Foreign Perspectives

One topic that was hotly debated up until quite recently was whether or not there was an effect on your site traffic related to where you hosted your site. It has since been confirmed by google that they use the IP address of your hosting service as a factor in prioritising the search results.

This means that one very easy way to increase the traffic on your site is to ensure that either your site is hosted in the country in which your main customers are based. So, if you target the UK then your site should ideally be hosted in the UK.

Changing hosts can be a hassle and isn’t something to be done at your busy time of year. However, one simple change that you can do in minutes is simply to tell google that the site is targetted at the appropriate country. To do this, you need to sign up for google’s webmaster tools, claim the domain, verify that it’s yours and then tell them what country it’s appropriate to. Sounds complicated, but really it’s very easy and quick.

The improvement in traffic can be very dramatic and kicks in within a week or two. In our own case, one domain had THIRTY times the site traffic when it was moved from an American host to a UK one.