How Do Content Delivery Networks Affect SEO?
The Impact of Content Delivery Networks on SEO
Today, businesses are increasingly moving online to showcase their offerings to a broader audience and promote their businesses. Industry research shows that the number of sales, the number of customers reached, business visibility achieved and brand awareness metrics of a company are directly related to the depth of content on the company’s website.
There is one crucial common denominator between the offline and online world for businesses- a good LOCATION. It is essential that when your prospective customer is looking out evaluating potential companies to shop from, you need to be visible to them.
While, in the offline parlance, that may refer to real-estate, in the online world, it is the search engines that act as the doorway for your widespread business visibility and reach. Visibility is the key objective that Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) aims to address for your business. SEO helps your business to get found online when people type in a phrase or keyword.
It has become so crucial that companies can rise or fall due to their results in their position on search engines. By improving your SEO, you will be able to provide higher visibility for your online businesses, and resultantly you will attain higher conversions and impact your bottom-line.
Search Engine, Bing, reports that websites on the top position get 42% of the traffic; the second gets 11% and third, only gets 8%. Hence, it is vital to come on top to get maximum traffic.
Getting to the top on Search Engine is not magic, and there are several factors that search engine algorithms take into account. In January 2018; Google, which accounts for around 80% of global searches, announced that page speed is going to be a critical ranking factor.
People browsing the internet want answers faster, especially with mobile traffic exceeding the desktop-based traffic.
Then, Google made a major announcement in its mobile-first indexing approach from 2018 onwards. While the website loading speed is always considered an important ranking factor, this announcement from Google can be construed as a clear guideline as to what webmasters need to make sure to rank high on search engines.
Today websites have become increasingly rich and complex – numerous JavaScript, videos, images and CSS files are hosted on the server to create a rich and engaging user experience for the website visitors. It is essential because you would want to deliver an experience that delights – the key to getting conversions. However, it comes with a drawback. Hosting these hefty additional files means that it affects the page loading speed.
Websites offer opportunities for businesses to cater to a global audience and companies can utilize global markets with a delightful website experience, where page loading speed is a critical component.
The farther the website server is located from the user, the longer it will take for the content to load. To this end, CDNs have emerged as a powerful strategy for online businesses.
How CDNs are Linked To Your SEO?
CDNs are essentially a network of geographically distributed servers that cache website content thereby storing a copy of the website in multiple data centers across the globe. When the user requests a page from the website, the request hits the nearest CDN node, and the content gets delivered from the cached content from the CDN’s Points of Presence ( PoPs).
CDNs dramatically reduce the request-to-delivery time so the webpage gets delivered much faster. CDNs also offer other benefits as well. You can store your images on the CDN and deliver these visuals directly from the PoPs. Images typically take a longer time to load, and you can optimize your website’s speed by storing the images on a CDN.
CDNs offer significant SEO benefits by providing:
- Faster load times
- Image optimization
- Session optimization
- Scalability
- Security
Websites today cater to a global audience; therefore, it is imperative to deliver a top-notch experience to users all around, even if they have a lower bandwidth. CDNs play a crucial role in making websites load faster. We already discussed how frowned-upon latency is while delivering a response from the server, especially when the server is located significantly further.
A CDN will help reduce latency and minimize packet loss, helping to speed up the delivery of your content to the end-user.
Other features within the CDN helps to improve your SEO. By using caching algorithms and canonical headers, CDNs help to combat duplicate content issues which help to enhance the SEO of your website. Google ranking algorithms penalize sites if they host duplicate content in multiple places.
CDNs also help mitigate disasters such as website crashes during traffic peaks and protects against DDoS attacks which can bring down your website. If your website shows a server-side crash or a 404, this is terrible for your SEO because it directly affects the user experience and leads to users bouncing away from your website –a signal that Google considers in evaluating the trustworthiness of a site.
Unless tended soon enough and your website goes back live; you can quickly lose your ranking very quickly.
Also, CDNs utilize hardware and software more efficiently to optimize content storage and access. For example, more frequently accessed information can be stored within SSD drives or on RAM while less frequently accessed content will be stored on hard drives.
With built-in machine learning algorithms, CDNs can make routing and caching decisions real-time to provide optimal cost and storage for your server resources. Scalability that CDNs offer will help you to adjust your deployment based on your immediate needs and reduce the cost of maintaining or purchasing additional servers that will only be needed for peak times.
Bottom Line
CDNs play a significant part in optimizing page speed. Websites’ load times significantly impact their search ranking directly.
A CDN can help you index your website faster in the Search Engine Results Pages. With more visibility in multiple and strategic locations, your business will get higher brand recognition and can grow and take advantage of the global markets.
When correctly set up, a CDN can be an easy and cost-effective technology to speed up your website loading speed-boosting your SEO as well as the user experience on your website.
Where do we come in?
At Medianova, we are experts in providing you with top-notch and cost-effective CDN solutions to optimize and improve your site performance and content delivery. With Medianova; you are all set up for online success: We bring years of expertise with experience in providing the right solution with our wide-range CDN solutions.
