eCommerce is the rising business trend today. As it’s a low-investment, low-risk business idea, more and more webpreneurs are jumping on its bandwagon every day. However, no matter the type of product or service you’re selling, you need to stand out from the competition to sell.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is arguably the most important step of digital marketing today. As more and more customers tend to go online to fulfill their needs, ranking at the top of a search engine’s results is crucial for getting noticed and acquiring customers.
Proxies today are being used for various processes of SEO monitoring. They provide several benefits to anonymously acquire the necessary data from search engines to climb up the search results. But what exactly is a proxy? Let’s get you hooked up.
What’s a residential proxy?
A proxy serves as the “middle man” between your computer and the server you’re requesting information from. For example, when you visit a webpage on your PC, your request first has to go through this middle layer to reach the destination server.
But why use a proxy? You use it to ensure anonymity in your web searches. Alongside tons of other uses of residential proxies, they’re actively used in SEO monitoring to improve a business’s ranking in a search engine.
Using a residential proxy while conducting research and collecting data lets you conceal your location and identity and perform these actions as a regular customer sitting in another part of the globe.
Efficient keyword research
Your search engine preferences and autocomplete suggestions are based on your usage history and personal information. Using your primary machine and account information to research those keywords won’t give out the ideal results.
The best way to go about it is to use a residential proxy to conceal your identity and location. That way, you can access the web as an anonymous identity approaching the search engine from a different location.
Using this method also gives you the ability to research local keywords for different geographical locations, enabling you to target individual audiences differently.
Outgrowing your competitors
To outsmart your competitors and beat them in search engine rankings, you must be able to research their performance and directly compare it with yours. With data scraping and residential proxies, you can do exactly that by collecting the SEO keywords your competitors use in their websites’ content.
Moreover, residential proxies allow you to monitor your ranking performance as a fresh user making that query for the first time. It lets you take the necessary actions needed to outsmart and outgrow your competitors.
Using residential proxies also enables you to monitor your performance from a different location. For example, your website might be ranking #1 in one area but #5 in another one. If that’s the case, you can take the necessary measures to improve your SEO in the low-performance areas to achieve more traffic. For more ways how to improve your ranking you should upgrade your marketing strategy, contact a digital marketing agency for consulting.
Accurately derive your marketing strategy
Whether you’re trying to boost your existing sales or building a marketing strategy from scratch, you need accurate data to achieve your goals. Using residential proxies, you can get your hands on data scrapped from different devices and geographical regions and use it to boost your business visibility.
Getting around website bans
If a competitor finds out about the device you’re using to scrap their page data, they might ban your IP address from accessing their website. This will horribly slow down your scrapping process and reduce your efficiency.
To counter this problem, you must use a proxy to mask your IP address. As your requests go through a middle server before they reach the target website, they can never identify and ban your device. You can also access geo-blocked websites and stats with the use of residential proxies.
SEO is one of the most common digital marketing strategies today — and it’s one of the most effective as well. Proxies are used to perform web scraping of your competitor’s pages to improve your SEO. The key takeaway is that, proxies enable you to surf the competitors’ pages safely and securely, minimizing the risks of bans. Keep that in mind!
About the Author: Allen is an SEO analytics manager with 6 years of experience. Allen has proven her expertise with unique and professional designs of SEO strategies that have successfully garnered her employees exceptional online visibility and conversion rates.
