SEO is the most fundamental component of any online marketing strategy today. Google’s search results generate billions of dollars of revenue for thousands of companies daily. So getting every bit of SEO optimization out of it helps grow your business.
Proxies are a great technology that can take your SERP ranking to the next level. But not all marketers know how proxies work and what they can be used for. So what exactly are proxies and how do they improve your SEO?
What is a proxy server?
A proxy server is a gateway between a user and the internet that anonymizes the user’s identity when browsing the web. Usually, a user sends a request directly to the website or search engine, like a Google search for “best SEO blogs in 2022“. The website or search engine then replies with the content – in this case, the search results for the best SEO blogs. By using a proxy server, the request is sent to the proxy first, which then redirects the request to the website or search engine. This way, the website or search engine cannot identify the user, because the IP address of the proxy server is used, instead of the actual IP address of the user.
In marketing, proxies are the core technology that enables web scraping. Web scraping means collecting and analyzing large amounts of publicly available web data, like pricing data from your competitor’s websites. Data is information, and information is key to improving your SEO. Without proxies, sending many requests from one IP address in a short amount of time would get you blocked. With proxies, you can access those sites with different IP addresses and gather all the information available.
How proxies are used to improve SEO
Proxies can add value to each step of the SEO process. Here are a few ways how proxies can massively improve your SEO efforts:
Keyword research
Proxies let you do keyword research at scale, fully automated. You can scrape the search results for different locations, analyze what your competitors are ranking for and track any changes in keyword popularity over time. Manually acquiring this data would take forever. With proxies, it is very easy.
Market research
Proxies are a great tool for conducting market research. With proxies, you can gather, structure, and analyze all available information about your competitors, like their pricing or customers. Proxies let you collect SEO-related information as well, like what keywords your competitors cover, how they structure their pages, what they post about and how often they post, or how their website traffic changes over time.
SERP Monitoring
Search engines display SERPs personalized to users, based on the information that they have about them (like location, past search history, or device used). This means that your ranking for a keyword is different for your various target audiences. By using proxies, you can pretend to be a user from a different location using a different device, with no past search history. For example, you can connect to a proxy in China to see how your search result is displayed for target audiences from that area (and in what ranking position). This is also called rank tracking, and it is especially helpful for large-scale SEO campaigns.
Social Media Account Management
Another use case of proxies is creating and managing multiple social media accounts. Social media sites have many mechanisms to block automated account creation, but proxies can bypass those mechanisms. So if you want to see how your social ads are displayed to different target audiences, proxies let you create different accounts and monitor your ads easily.
There are many more use cases for proxies in SEO (also grey-hat or black-hat ones), but we won’t be able to cover all of them in this article.
Choosing the best proxy for SEO optimization
There are various proxy providers out there, so choosing the right solution might be an overwhelming task. Here is what you should consider in your proxy evaluation.
Residential proxies, Data Center proxies, or Mobile proxies
There are three types of proxies out there that have technological differences: Residential proxies, Mobile Proxies and Data Center Proxies. For marketing and SEO use, we recommend either Residential or Mobile Proxies. Data center proxies are less suitable for the SEO use case because they use lower quality “virtual” IP addresses and are more likely to get banned.
Mobile proxies have the advantage of rotating IP addresses, which means that the IP address of your proxy changes from time to time. Therefore, Mobile proxies have access to a very large pool of IPs, and they are also the least likely to get banned for reasons that we have covered in this article on our Proxidize Blog.
Free proxies or Paid Proxies
Generally, you should avoid free proxies as they oftentimes are neither reliable nor secure or ethical. There have been many cases of shady proxy providers illegally using other people’s devices as proxies, stealing data, or displaying ads on websites everywhere. So make sure that you go with an established vendor that charges a reasonable price, not a potentially shady free proxy vendor.
How can I set up a proxy server and get started?
The term proxy server sounds quite technical, but don’t let that put you off. Proxies are actually very easy to use, even without any technical knowledge. There are two ways of getting started with proxies: You can either buy them from a proxy vendor or build them yourself.
Building your own proxies has multiple advantages:
- Quality: Building your own proxies generally means that you get higher quality proxies. This is because you are in full control, and can make sure that you are using the best hardware.
- Reliability: For the same reason, reliability with building your own mobile proxies is much higher than with legacy vendors.
- Speed: You get a much higher average speed of up to 30 MBps on 4G/LTE and up to 1 GBps on 5G.
- Control & Privacy: Building your own proxies gives you full control over the devices that your data passes through. No data leaves your control, and the risk of sending your data through untrustworthy devices is 0%.
- Price: The price per GB of traffic passing through your proxies is up to 10x lower compared to legacy solutions.
At Proxidize, we have developed an all-in-one solution that lets you easily build and manage your own mobile proxies. Proxidize delivers all of the hardware and software out of the box, so you just need to plug everything together and can start using your proxy within a few minutes.
Do you want to learn more about how proxies can take your SEO to the next level? We are looking forward to hearing from you!
