How important is the location of your ISP?

Recently we have done a report for a local company with strong links to the local business community with a well known brand name and a web site.

The web site has been optimised to a certain degree, in that there are Meta Tags, some pages of information and action for people to take and look at, and the site is known a little bit by Google and Yahoo.

Despite it having some visitors, and some information and key words, it has a zero paid ranking from Google in the UK.

One of the main reasons for this I suspect (obviously because nobody actually knows) is that the ISP is German, and when searches are carried out using specialist software the web site shows up as being registered in Germany as well.

This is obviously a bit of an issue, as if this is showing up on a normal search, then the Google spiders are going to recognise it as a German web site which is not very helpful when it is aimed at the UK market.

So what can you do to change this?

First thing to do I suspect will be to change ISP provider. Our company uses two providers, Namesco and UK2.net. UK2.net has suffered over the years with bad publicity from various users, as it had a terrible customer care service and I speak from direct experience of this. It does do very well for rankings though, and pages that our SEO company have set up personally and developed have had good page rankings and been picked up fairly quickly by Google and Yahoo. There are certainly strong suggestions that with a site like this, where the name is quite well known and you would expect to see at least one page ranking if not two, that the ISP was playing rather an important role in preventing that site from gaining any ranking.

In summary, I would advise anyone who has an overseas ISP to strongly consider switching to a UK provider. Email us your web site address and we can have a look and let you know where your provider is located.

You can contact us at enquiries@chesterwebmarketing.co.uk or visit www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk