Rule of thumb, ALWAYS host your website in the country of your target audience. There’s this thing in the big bad world of SEO called “localised search query”. I won’t go into too much detail; instead I will show you what it means in this image.
Notice I clicked “pages from the UK”? Google will intelligently remove all websites that don’t have an IP address registered in the UK while conducting this search. They do look and IP addresses and give you weighting by the location of your IP address. A good little tool to check where your site is hosted is at Domain Tools. Just enter your website URL or the IP address if you know it and it will tell you where your host is located.
If you need help with finding hosting providers in the country you desire, you can always go to a few forums for web hosting. Web Hosting Talk is one of the best forums on this topic and is very active. Another good resource is HostSearch.
Now this may all change going further as search engines continue to innovate. Google may eventually provide you with search results from your own city, neighbourhood, post code or even street. That, probably will not make any difference to where your IP is located. As long as its in the same country, you’re sorted.
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A real world example is an experiment that I conducted myself. One of my clients had a website catered for US audiences hosted in the UK. It wasn’t ranking well like all the other websites in the same business sector. A lot of effort was put into content, on page SEO, link building and technical SEO innovation. It was definitely more SEO’d than all the competitors but it would continue to linger between position 28 and 36 on page 3 and 4. Switched hosting to US server and BAM! Position 6 in 3 weeks! They are still working their SEO magic on it now and it will hopefully earn them the Jesus spot very soon.
Our blog is being hosted at blogger.com. Should we move it to our local site for better SEO? If so, should it be on a subdomain or in a directory within the domain?
Thanks in advance,
Mike
Blogger.com should be OK as they have a content delivery network that is local to every region. The main hosting servers may be somewhere in the US, but the CDN is helping you rank in your region.