SEO for Colocation Companies: Challenges and Opportunities

When colocation companies look to improve their online visibility, they often find themselves swimming in a sea of generic SEO advice. You’ve likely seen the lists: use keywords, optimize your metadata, build backlinks, write blog posts. All of that is true — but for the colocation industry, it’s not enough.

At SilverServers in Kamloops, BC, we understand this firsthand. Not only do we offer SEO services, web design, and hosting, but we also operate a 10,000-square-foot data centre and offer colocation services ourselves. This gives us a unique vantage point: we know the technical landscape, and we understand the nuances of marketing it in search engines.

In this article, we’ll go beyond the basics and talk about what matters when it comes to SEO for colocation companies: the specific challenges and opportunities that are often overlooked.

The SEO Challenges of Marketing Colocation Services in Search Engines

1. Niche Market, Competitive Keywords

"Colocation" may be a clear term for IT professionals, but it's not always a common search term for business decision-makers. At the same time, the keywords that are being used (“data centre services”, “server hosting”, “Vancouver colocation”) are competitive, often dominated by national or international providers.

The challenge: ranking for those terms without competitive budgets.

2. Technical Language Can Be a Barrier

Much of the terminology around colocation is dense: power redundancy, cooling zones, cross-connects, rack units. This creates a balancing act for SEO. On one hand, search engines rely on these technical terms to understand and rank your content. On the other, overly technical language can alienate non-technical decision-makers who are evaluating your services.

Striking the right tone is key — clear enough for readers, specific enough for search engines.

3. Location-Specific Search Intent

Many colocation customers are searching with geography in mind — and in BC, that can be especially granular. Someone searching for "colocation Kelowna" or "data centre near Kamloops" has specific needs. But if your site isn’t optimized for those local intents, you’re missing traffic.

Local SEO for colocation isn’t just about having an address on your website — it’s about showing up in map results, local directories, and regionally relevant content. And don’t forget all those layman-friendly keywords!

See more on general SEO tips and colocation services.

4. Long B2B Sales Cycles

SEO often relies on conversion signals to determine the effectiveness of a page. But colocation services typically involve longer decision-making timelines, often with consultations, tours, and internal approvals. That makes SEO tracking and ROI measurement more difficult, because a potential client may like your colocation offerings, but not be able to move their servers into your facility for several years.

By the time they actually reach out to you, it will likely be challenging to pinpoint SEO as the reason they found you.

The Opportunities in SEO for Colocation Companies

Despite the challenges, there are clear and often underused opportunities for colocation companies to stand out:

1. Be Local, Be Found

Google prioritizes local results when it knows there’s a physical service area involved. That’s a huge opportunity. For companies like ours — offering colocation out of a data centre in Kamloops — we can and should lean into that local presence. Create city-specific landing pages, write content that references your region, and ensure your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate.

2. Content That Educates and Converts

Not everyone searching for colocation is a sysadmin. CEOs, startup founders, and IT managers may all have a say in the decision. That means content needs to strike a balance between being technically accurate and broadly accessible. Educational blog posts, case studies, and explainer videos can all help increase engagement and reduce bounce rates. We suggest choosing a target audience before writing.

Some ideas to get started if your target is a less technical audience:

• What is colocation, and is it right for your business?
• How [your city] businesses are benefiting from local data centres
• Colocation vs cloud: Which one is more cost-effective?

3. Show Your Technical Credibility

If you operate your own data centre, say so — often and clearly. In our case, SilverServers doesn’t just offer SEO services; we host websites and colocated servers in our own facility. That kind of technical authority can and should be leveraged in your content. Schema markup can help reinforce these credentials to search engines, while well-crafted landing pages can build trust with human visitors.

4. Strategic Link Building Through Partnerships

Colocation businesses often work with Managed Service Providers (MSP),Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, and local tech startups. These relationships are opportunities for backlinks. Co-written blog posts, case studies, or even regional tech directory listings can help boost your domain authority without resorting to spammy tactics.

For example, we're partnered with a local MSP who wrote a useful article with us about finding and editing hosts files.

5. Stand Out With Transparency

Many colocation providers rely on vague marketing language. You can differentiate by being specific: offer pricing guidelines, show photos of your facility, publish uptime stats. That kind of openness not only helps SEO, but increases trust and time-on-site.

Final Thoughts: Why SilverServers Has a Unique Perspective

Most SEO companies haven’t stepped foot in a data centre, let alone managed one. SilverServers is different. We know SEO inside and out, but we also live in the world of power backups, cooling systems, and fibre links. That gives us an edge in helping colocation companies improve their visibility without watering down their technical message.

Whether you're a data centre operator or a colocation provider looking to grow in BC (or anywhere else),we understand the landscape — because we’re in it ourselves.

Need help building a strategy that connects your colocation services with the people searching for them? Let’s talk.

Looking for SEO for your colocation company? Contact SilverServers — we bring technical know-how and marketing expertise together under one roof.

For more, visit the colocation articles section of our blog.