As part of my SEO Audit on any site I always check where the web site is hosted, it is an important issue when quoting for work.
This site is hosted by Blacknight web hosting because their hosting is in Ireland and my target market is Ireland, (I have no connection with them financial or otherwise – great customer service and by phone too). If you are targeting Ireland it is better for online marketing purposes to have your hosting IP address as Irish. (Not all Irish web hosting companies have this)
If your target market is the UK then host in the UK, if your target market is worldwide then host where most of your customers live. (With very strong sites this tends to be less of an issue)
If you host your website in the UK and want to target the Irish market you are starting with a disadvantage compared to other businesses that host locally. If you host in the UK and have a .ie domain name you have less of a disadvantage.
If your target market is the UK and your web hosting is in Ireland again you are at a disadvantage to businesses who are hosting in the UK.
These problems can be over come, however it will cost more money than getting the hosting right to start with or just moving your website to a new hosting service in the target market. Moving your web hosting for a small site is usually fairly easy, however once you have a site with a lot of content and run by a backend database and CMS it does get a bit trickier to keep service through-out the transfer.
If you host in Ireland and target the Irish market, every link, (hyperlink), that you build pointing to your website will help your website to be seen better in Google. This is not the case if your web hosting is in the UK and your are not using a .ie domain name; in this example you will need to build links from Irish based sites and more specifically from Irish based sites with .ie domain names.
For example: I am currently working on an Irish site that for technical reasons cannot be moved to a UK hosting company, (again). They are number 1 & 2 in Ireland for their keywords, indented listings. In the UK searching on google.co.uk and setting my browser in order that Google thinks I am searching from the UK I see they are at number 9 and 19 for their main keywords. This site was at one time hosted in the UK and had to be moved back to Ireland, while it was UK based the search results showed them ranking high on the front page, as soon as the site transferred back to Ireland they lost their rankings.
Solving this problem is costing money. I am spending a week once again building links, thought this time all the links I build have to be more specific, they all have to come from UK IP addresses with hosting in the UK and with a preference for .co.uk or some other .uk extension. I had already worked on this problem from the other way around, they were hosted in the UK and I had built enough Irish links to have them rank at the top here in Ireland.
The moral of this story? Get the web hosting right in the beginning and don’t move regions. However links from your desired region will get you ranking there over time.
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