Why Proxies for SEO Are Becoming Vital for Organizations

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a whole set of practices that help a business rank on search engines. By ranking, we necessarily mean appearing on the first few results on the result pages. The key attribute of ranking is keywords.

A brand or a website can never rank on all the keywords that exist. But, they can choose a set of keywords that they are intending to rank on.

In the past, due to the scarcity of quality content and websites, ranking on the SERPs was comparatively easier. Stuffing irrelevant keywords, using hidden texts, or generating fake backlinks were the most common practices among marketers.

But once the algorithms pivoted towards providing the users with more relevant results, the game changed.

Now, the black-hat link-building strategies that we mentioned above; work. But are not as effectively as they did before.

However, a new approach to SEO has become mainstream in recent times. Data scraping.

Data scraping is used to harvest competitor keywords and backlinks to analyze their SEO strategy. Plus, a few more things. To employ that in your SEO strategy, you need SEO proxies.

What are SEO Proxies

SEO proxies help you hide behind their network of devices that mask your IP address from the search engines and social media platforms. Typically residential proxies are used for the purpose.

In addition to protecting you from the above-said platforms, residential proxies let you browse the web from specific locations. More on that later.

Some benefits derived from SEO proxies are almost considered gray-hat practices. But when everyone is doing it to trump you, the moral line diminishes.

Moreover, the proxies are essentially there to mask your SEO practices from the intruding eyes of search engines and social media platforms.

Let’s discuss common SEO techniques that are executed with proxies.

Anonymous Search Results

Search engines thrive on personalization. They often–through algorithms–present results that you may want to visit. But what’s a boon for one, bane for other.

Marketers, who are associated with a brand, browse through their websites a lot. If a personalized result is presented, they may find it hard to audit the competitors’ websites, presenting a biased result.

Proxies help marketers stay anonymous while analyzing the keywords on search engines or social media platforms.

By hiding their IP address and location with residential proxy IP, they can search the internet anonymously and get unbiased results that a genuine customer may see.

With these genuine results, marketers can make assumptions about where their business stands and what needs to be done for betterment.

Keyword Tracking and SEO Monitoring

Data scraping is often the go-to method for a content marketing agency to track competitor keywords and SEO strategies.

Without data scraping, you may find yourself manually searching for thousands of keywords, short or long, to find your competitor ranking on just three of those—a wastage of time and resources.

Data scraping helps extract the keywords that your competitors rank on to present you with their SEO strategy. Additionally, you can scrape search engines and social media platforms to find your and their best keywords and how they compete.

However, most search engines, social media platforms, and websites discourage the use of data scraping bots to your benefit.

You may also want to prevent bots from scraping your website for fear of content stealing and giving away a competitive advantage.

Since in most cases these websites use IP tracking to prevent data scraping, using a proxy to rotate and hide your IP address may be the best choice.

You can send thousands of requests to the websites through your scraping bot without ever getting caught and being banned.  

Improved Social Media Management

Social media marketing requires the use of different social media accounts. You may need to create different accounts for different brands or different accounts for different tasks. One of your accounts may be used for PPC ads, the other for audience engagement.

But whatever the case, multiple accounts on the same platform neither is encouraged nor tolerated by the social media platforms.

Lacking awareness, you may get banned from the platforms and lose millions of followers overnight.

In addition to managing accounts, you can also find important marketing data from social media. By employing web scraping, you can find critical information about your followers, competitors, the type of posts that are trending, comments, likes, and more.

You may also analyze the sentiment of your customers through social media and get to know what’s being talked about on the platforms.

To keep operating several accounts or scrape data, you must employ proxy servers to hide your presence from the social media algorithms. The proxy providers rotate the IP address with each session to ensure your safety from getting banned.

Bypassing Geo-Restrictions

More often than not, marketers need to access the search engine result pages (SERPs) from a different location to see how the local SEO is faring. Moreover, they also might need to check the geo-restricted content of their competitors.

As there’s no way to pinpoint a location on the search engines, you need to simulate the position through proxies to make the search engines and the websites believe that the requests are originating from the same location.

Residential proxies are used for bypassing geo-restrictions. As this kind of proxy also offers anonymity, they are the primary choice for most marketers.

Improving Load Time

A major white-hat SEO technique revolves around website load time. If a website is slow to load, the users may revert to the SERPs, increasing the bounce rate.

Which is the percentage of users that bounce back to the search engines without spending enough time on your website.

This problem can be mitigated by using a proxy cache. The proxy caches are duplicate copies of your website that are stored on different servers around the world.

Whenever a user decides to visit your landing page, the nearest server is triggered, resulting in a reduced loading time.

Since Google has started focusing on page load times, its effect on SEO has become indispensable. In the latest core updates, they recommended a page load speed of less than a second for optimum results.

Search Result Scraping for Backlinks

Search engine scraping can help you find important backlinks of your competitors. Backlinks are links that direct the consumers to the target website.

By scraping for important backlinks, you can discover backlink opportunities that were cloaked from you. Social media platforms, blogs, and other media channels can become backlink opportunities once you’ve gathered their info.

Again, rotating proxies can help you scrape the websites for critical information.

A gray-hat approach towards backlinking is using automated bots that find related websites and leave comments with your website link. It may be effective but isn’t recommended. Your website may get penalized for employing this practice for SEO.

However, if you hold your high moral grounds, you may also lose the SEO race without even being penalized.

Plus, you can stay safe from the Google spiders if you use rotating proxies for commenting. If you stay within your limits and don’t overdo the link building, you may not ever be found and penalized. 

Using Traffic Bots to Simulate Clicks

Typically, a user finds your website through direct channels, search engines, or guest posts on other websites and spends some time on your website.

If the process is repeated with different users enough, the click-through rate (CTR) increases, and your ranking sores. This process may take long before you can see any significant changes to your ranking position.

However, this whole visitor cycle can be simulated through traffic bots that aren’t genuine users but helps improve dwell-time and CTR.

Considering that you’ve built authoritative backlinks with white-hat techniques, this gray-hat SEO technique can improve your rank in a matter of days. But, to effectively use the bots, you must use a proxy to hide the requests.

The point is to click on the links as unique visitors. By using a proxy, you ensure that your IP addresses are changed with each user session (click) and the IPs aren’t repeated. You can also ensure that the hits get generated from different countries with help of residential proxies.

The Bottom Line

To stay competitive in this overcrowded SEO market, you need to empower yourself with tools that can help you stay ahead.

One of such tools is SEO proxy. SEO proxies can help you through anonymity, agility, and accuracy to develop an SEO strategy that’s effective and fast.

From keyword tracking to link building, from improved load time to using traffic bots, proxies have become vital for organizations in every sector. Data scraping–the heart of SEO–can’t be carried out without involving proxy servers.

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