Hosting in Ireland for better regional search results…

What hosting package you require depends entirely on the needs of your website, however there is one issue which was vital for this site, and in my experience is sometimes overlooked by small business websites…

My potential clients are mostly local clients – Irish, and particularly from Cork, so it is vital that my site perform well in local searches.

Local searches are searches performed on Google.ie (as opposed to Google.com) and searches that use the ‘pages from Ireland’ option.

To ensure I perform optimally in these types of searches, I used an Irish hosting company. To determine what country you’re site is most relevant to, Google takes into consideration the top level domain (.com .ie .fr etc) and the IP address of the server you are hosted on, as they state in their webmaster tools support.

Talk to your hosting provider and ask them if you are unsure whether they can provide an Irish IP address.

While American hosters can be cheaper, if you are an Irish business and if your customers are based in Ireland, then it is important to ensure that your website is associated with Ireland.

There is also a tool in the Google Webmaster toolkit which allows you to specify the country your site is targetting, regardless of where your site is hosted.

At the time of writing, however, it is my belief that for a small and simple website which is targetting local clients the best option is to host with an Irish hoster.

If you are already hosting elsewhere, or if you have a site has different areas that target different regions, be sure and check out the webmaster tool – however if you already have a country specific top level domain, such as .ie you will not be able to change your target region using this tool.

If you have not considered any of this before, I recommend comparing your search results across Google.com, Google.ie and Google.ie using the ‘pages from Ireland’ option. If you are not performing well in .ie and pages from Ireland, perhaps you should examine where you are hosted.

Feel free to drop me a line if you think I might be able to help.