How We Ranked a Singapore Web Host at #1 for “Web Hosting” and Inside Google’s AI Overviews
Host SG had no XML sitemap, a desktop page speed score of 35, and 122 ranking keywords. Today they hold eight #1 positions, 44% more organic clicks, and 6,860 impressions inside Google’s AI-generated answers.
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Host SG is a Singapore-based web hosting provider offering shared hosting, business cloud hosting, dedicated servers and domain registration to Singapore businesses. Founded in 1997, it has grown alongside Singapore’s digital economy for nearly three decades, serving more than 280,000 users worldwide, from first-time bloggers to Fortune 500 companies. The previous agency they were working with was struggling to deliver results despite over a year of engagement.
Their founder reached out to us after tangible results with their previous agency felt “impossible”. He found us on Google after searching for “SEO agency Singapore” and valued our emphasis on quality over quantity. We also shared the E-E-A-T SEO content framework we use to plan, write and rank SEO content across all our clients. He was impressed.
We started with auditing his website for technical website issues. No amount of content would help if the technical SEO of a site was not up to the mark.
SEO Challenges Holding Host SG Back
1. No XML sitemap at all
There was no XML sitemap on the site. Google had no map of the website, no efficient way to discover new pages, and no signal about which pages mattered. Of the pages being crawled, roughly 59 were indexed.
2. A desktop experience slower than mobile
Google PageSpeed Insights scored the site 52/100 on mobile and 35/100 on desktop, with Core Web Vitals issues flagged. For a company whose entire product is website performance, a slow website is not only a ranking problem. It is a credibility problem, and it is the first thing a technical buyer checks.
3. A 69% site health score and over 5,400 open issues
Our Semrush audit across 137 pages returned 75 errors, 5,001 warnings and 421 notices. Among them: 2,179 uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files, 2,179 uncached resources, 653 pages without an H1, and 218 images with no alt text.
4. Every service crammed onto shared pages
Shared hosting, business cloud hosting and enterprise hosting were not properly separated into dedicated pages built to rank for their own keywords. In hosting, buyers search by product type, “shared server hosting”, “dedicated server hosting singapore”, and a combined page cannot win any of those searches convincingly. Worse, several of the hosting links were not even clickable.
5. A crawl structure that buried the money pages
39 pages sat more than three clicks from the homepage. 13 pages had a single incoming internal link. Four commercially important pages including /hosting/, /hosting/enterprise-hosting/ and /hosting/business-linux/ were orphaned, sitting in no navigation path at all. Meanwhile 2,743 internal links carried no anchor text, giving Google almost no signal about what any page was about.
6. 134 redirects creating crawl friction
75 URLs sat behind temporary (302) redirects and 59 behind permanent (301) redirects, with one broken sitemap link firing a 301 from nearly every page on the site.
7. Missing schema on every commercial page
Only breadcrumb schema was present. There was no service schema and no FAQ schema, despite the service pages already carrying FAQ content that was earning nothing in search.
8. A backlink profile with a third flagged as toxic and almost no editorial links
33.3% of backlinks were flagged toxic and a further 7.5% potentially toxic, with 10 lost and 12 broken links. Links pointed inconsistently across www, non-www, http and https versions of the domain, splitting authority four ways. Underneath the volume, there was almost nothing an editor had chosen to link to.
9. An unoptimised Google Business Profile and no social proof
The GMB profile had no keyword-optimised description, incomplete service listings, no Q&A and too few reviews. The homepage carried no trust elements, no customer numbers, no social proof, for a purchase where trust is the entire decision.
10. Not ranking for the keywords that drive hosting sales
Host SG ranked for 122 keywords in total, drawing roughly 331 organic visits a month from Singapore. The commercial terms that convert such as “web hosting”, “singapore web hosting services” and “dedicated server hosting singapore” were nowhere near the top of Page 1.
11. No presence in AI search
No llms.txt and no structured setup for AI crawlers, at exactly the moment buyers began researching hosting providers through ChatGPT and AI Overviews instead of ten blue links.
What We Did
1Built and submitted the missing XML sitemap
We created a clean XML sitemap, stripped the categories that did not belong in it, submitted it to Google, and tightened robots.txt to stop crawl budget leaking into tag and category pages. For the first time, Google had a map of the site.
2Split every service onto its own page, mapped to its own keyword
Rather than one page trying to sell everything, we gave shared hosting, business cloud hosting, dedicated servers and domain registration dedicated pages, each mapped to a single commercial keyword and optimised for it. We also fixed the hosting links that were not clickable.
The result is visible in the rankings: the dedicated servers page now holds #1 for “dedicated server hosting singapore” with an AI Overview placement, up 17 positions. The shared hosting page holds #1 for “shared server hosting”.
3Cleared 134 redirects and every broken resource
All 75 temporary and 59 permanent redirects were resolved, along with 113 internal resources returning no response, 58 pages with internal 3xx chains, four mixed-content issues, two broken CSS files and one broken image.
4Fixed the internal linking signal at scale
We addressed 2,743 internal links carrying no anchor text and 102 internal nofollow outlinks, replacing generic and empty anchors with descriptive, keyword-relevant text. We brought the 39 deep-buried pages within three clicks of the homepage and gave the four orphaned pages genuine internal paths.
5Rebuilt the heading and metadata structure
653 pages were missing an H1. 25 pages had titles identical to their H1, 28 had duplicate H1 and title tags, two pages carried five H1s each, and 18 pages had no meta description. We rebuilt the heading hierarchy site-wide and wrote unique, intent-matched titles and descriptions.
6Fixed 218 images and cut page weight
We wrote alt text for 218 images and compressed 61 images over 100KB, alongside compressing, caching and minifying more than 2,000 JavaScript and CSS resources, directly targeting the page speed scores.
7Rebuilt the header, footer and homepage trust signals
We optimised the header and footer for navigation and crawlability, replaced the low-resolution logo, and added trust elements and social proof to the homepage. In hosting, the buyer is handing you their entire online presence. Proof that other businesses already did that is the conversion lever.
8Deployed the missing schema
The site had breadcrumb markup and nothing else. We built out detailed service schema markup across every hosting page and FAQ schema on the pages already carrying question-and-answer content, so Google could read what Host SG sells, at what price and on what terms, rather than inferring it from body copy.
9Rewrote the core pages, then built the hero asset
In the first phase we rewrote the homepage and every service page. In the second we published ten new supporting articles, each targeting a unique keyword.
One of them carries the result.
Rather than writing another “why choose us” page, we researched and published a genuinely useful comparison of Singapore’s web hosting companies. The kind of honest, side-by-side assessment with real pricing that no hosting provider is willing to publish about its own market. We followed it with a second piece on affordable hosting providers and what they actually charge.
Those two articles now hold:
- #1 for “web hosting” (1,000 monthly searches), up 28 positions
- #1 for “singapore web hosting services” (880 searches), up 10 positions
- #8 for “web hosting company singapore”
- #9 for “singapore web hosting” (880 searches)
- #9 for “website hosting services singapore” (880 searches)
- #10 for “web hosting singapore” (720 searches)
One article. Six Page 1 rankings, including the category’s biggest head term.
10Earned editorial coverage in Singapore’s expat media
A comparison article only works if other people trust it too. We placed Host SG in Expat Living Singapore’s “10 Best Web Hosting Companies in Singapore” feature, published July 2026, where Host SG is the first provider listed. Expat Living carries a Semrush Authority Score of 39 with backlinks from 5,688 referring domains, making it one of the strongest editorial domains available in the Singapore consumer market.
The placement earned six followed links across the pages that matter most:
| Anchor Text | Links To |
|---|---|
| web hosting companies in Singapore | /5-best-web-hosting-companies/ |
| HostSG | Homepage |
| shared hosting | /hosting/shared-web-hosting/ |
| cloud hosting | /hosting/business-cloud/ |
| dedicated servers | /hosting/enterprise-hosting/dedicated-servers/ |
| HostSG plans | /hosting/shared-web-hosting/ |
The first of those is the one that matters. An exact-match editorial link, from a genuine Singapore publication, pointing at the exact page that now ranks #1 for “web hosting”. The rest distribute authority straight into the four service pages we had just rebuilt.
11Made the site legible to AI search engines
We created and deployed llms.txt, unblocked resources in robots.txt, and structured content so AI crawlers could parse and cite it. Semrush now scores the site 81% for AI Search Health, with ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot and Google-Extended all able to reach the site without restriction.
That work is now measurable in Search Console’s Generative AI report, covered below.
The Results
Google Search Console and Semrush, comparison periods stated in each section
Google Search Console: last 6 months vs previous 6 months
| Metric | Previous 6 Months | Last 6 Months | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total clicks | 1,960 | 2,820 | +43.9% |
| Total impressions | 194,000 | 174,000 | −10.3% |
| Average CTR | 1.0% | 1.6% | +60% |
| Average position | 26.4 | 20.7 | 5.7 positions better |
Clicks up 44%. Impressions down 10%. That combination is the point, not a contradiction.
Before we started, Host SG was being shown to a very large number of people who were never going to click: 194,000 impressions converting at 1%. The pruning, the keyword mapping and the service page split all narrowed what the site appears for and sharpened what it appears as. The result is fewer, better impressions converting at 1.6%, from an average position that improved by almost six places.
Put another way: Host SG now earns 860 more visits a month from 20,000 fewer appearances. That is what qualified traffic looks like in a report.
Google Search Console: AI search visibility
Search Console’s Generative AI report measures how often a site appears inside Google’s AI-generated answers rather than the traditional ten blue links. Between 18 May and 23 July 2026, Host SG recorded 6,860 impressions in AI features, and the daily trend was still climbing at the end of the period.
Almost no Singapore hosting provider is measuring this channel yet, let alone competing in it.
Google Analytics: sessions referred from AI assistants
Search Console reports impressions inside AI features but does not yet report the clicks those features send. To see whether the visibility actually moves people onto the site, we tracked it separately in GA4 by session source.
Host SG now receives 504 sessions referred directly from AI assistants:
| Source | Sessions | Share of AI Assistant Sessions |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 348 | 69% |
| Gemini | 156 | 31% |
| Total | 504 | 100% |
Both sources still account for under 1% of total sessions, and that is the honest read of it. But this is a channel that did not meaningfully exist eighteen months ago, the visits arrive already researched, and Host SG is measuring it. Most of their competitors are doing none of those three things.
Bonus: AI Search Visibility
Host SG now holds a Semrush AI Visibility score of 19, with 29 brand mentions and 43 cited pages across ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini. ChatGPT alone accounts for 11 of those mentions and 27 cited pages. For a Singapore hosting provider, this is an acquisition channel virtually no competitor has touched.
Semrush: September 2025 vs July 2026
Measured in the same tool, same database, thirteen months apart.
| Metric | Sept 2025 | July 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic keywords (Singapore) | 122 | 302 | +147.5% |
| Organic traffic (Singapore) | 331 / month | 493 / month | +48.9% |
| Organic traffic value | US$849 | US$1,713 | +101.8% |
| Semrush Rank | 79,528 | 49,104 | 30,424 places better |
| Local pack keywords | 18 | 67 | +272% |
| Sitelink keywords | 108 | 198 | +83% |
The traffic value figure is the one to sit with. The organic visibility Host SG now holds would cost more than US$1,700 a month to buy through Google Ads, double what it was worth before we started.
Every #1 ranking
| Keyword | Volume | Position | SERP Feature | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| web hosting | 1,000 | #1 | AI Overview | +28 |
| singapore domain hosting | 880 | #1 | AI Overview | +3 |
| singapore web hosting services | 880 | #1 | AI Overview | +10 |
| singapore website hosting | 880 | #1 | AI Overview | +10 |
| dedicated server hosting singapore | 140 | #1 | AI Overview | +17 |
| host sg | 110 | #1 | Sitelinks | — |
| shared server hosting | 50 | #1 | AI Overview | +3 |
| shared website hosting | 50 | #1 | AI Overview | — |
The rest of Page 1
| Keyword | Volume | Position | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| web host sg | 880 | #4 | Local pack |
| web hosting company singapore | 90 | #8 | +3 |
| singapore web hosting | 880 | #9 | +2 |
| website hosting services singapore | 880 | #9 | +3 |
| web hosting singapore | 720 | #10 | +2 |
Twelve keywords on Page 1. Eight of them at the top spot.
Site health and technical foundation
| Metric | Before (Sept 2025) | After |
|---|---|---|
| Semrush site health | 69% | 89% |
| Errors / Warnings / Notices | 75 / 5,001 / 421 | 0 / 0 / 0 |
| Semrush AI Search Health | Not measured | 81% |
| XML sitemap | None | Live and submitted |
| PageSpeed — mobile | 52 / 100 | 88 / 100 |
| PageSpeed — desktop | 35 / 100 | 88 / 100 |
| Total backlinks | 10,200 | 12,476 |
A site health score of 89% puts Host SG within three points of the top 10% of all websites crawled by Semrush, which sit at 92%. The site went from a quarter of its pages missing from Google’s index to fully crawlable, with zero broken pages.
The page speed result is the one that matters most here. Host SG sells website performance, and their own desktop score had been sitting at 35 out of 100. It now scores 88 on both desktop and mobile. The product and the shopfront finally say the same thing.
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