Every website has to be hosted on a web server in order for it to be available to view online. If you are targeting the Irish online market, you’re usually better off going with hosting where the servers are based in Ireland.

In my experience your website will perform better for local search (Irish market) than the same site hosted in the USA (or Brazil or wherever), particularly if your domain is .com, .net, .org, .biz. You can get around this if your domain is a ‘.IE’ as Google, and most search engines, will identify your site as being targeted to the Irish market. The same would apply for a ‘.CO.UK’ domain for the UK market etc.

There are possible exceptions to this. I have had .com sites on Irish servers for years that performed well for local Irish search. I moved a couple of these to USA servers and there seems to have been no negative impact on their positions for Irish search to date, over three months later. Perhaps once a site is labelled as an ‘Irish’ website by Google, the server plays a less important roll thereafter?

In conclusion: If you are targeting the Irish online market you should ensure your website is on an Irish server. This is particularly the case if your website is a .com, .net, .biz, .org.

Tags: Irish online market, Irish search, Irish servers, web server, website

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