How to Use Proxies to Improve Your Keyword Search?
E-commerce is at the heart of businesses today. Statistically, it is expected to reach $5.4 trillion next year. It helps companies stay competitive in the market and increase customer attention. One of the best practices that businesses employ is search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is all about keyword search. Having a website means you have to know what keywords web users use. This is how search engines list you on top of the results page. And if you’re at the top of the results page, you will gain more website traffic.
Optimizing your website may mean that you are at risk of getting your internet IP address blacklisted. This is because there are certain strategies to SEO that can lead to getting your IP address banned. And we don’t want that to happen. That’s why businesses use proxies to prevent this from happening.
In this article, I will explain what a proxy is and how it works. In addition, I will also discuss why using a proxy server is a good way to promote your website.
Table of Contents
What is a Proxy and How does it Work?
What you heard is true. The internet keeps track of your IP address and location when you go online. And when your IP address is known, you can be blocked at certain websites. When you get blocked, it would be hard accessing the same website again.
A residential proxy server, though, helps you disguise your IP address so that it’s not traceable. Using a proxy allows you to go to restricted websites to access data without revealing your identity.
A proxy acts as a middleman between the user and the website. This results in the routing of all website traffic through it before reaching the destination.
To help you visualize it, here is an example.
Suppose a user visits Google without a proxy. A request will be sent to the internet service provider (ISP) first before it goes to Google servers. This is how your IP address is revealed. If you use a proxy, the same request will be sent. But this time, it is not sent to the ISP, but to Google servers.
In short, the proxy server will be the one to send the request and not the user. It gives out its IP address and location, concealing the user’s identity. As you can imagine, this is helpful when you do keyword research.
How Does a Proxy Help You With SEO?
Using SEO proxy servers does not only help you prevent being banned or blacklisted. There are numerous benefits of using SEO proxy servers and these include:
Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash
1. Allows access to restricted locations
Some companies and governments do not allow users from specific areas to access their websites. There are only selected countries that are given unrestricted access to their websites. For example, last 2018, European web users were banned from accessing some US news websites.
This is where SEO proxy servers come in. When you use a proxy server, it looks like you’re accessing their websites from a permitted area. Think VPNs. It connects you to a server in a permitted country, making bots harder to block you.
2. Allows for web scraping
To get all of the information you need for SEO, you need to do web scraping. For most organizations, web scraping is a popular SEO approach. Scraping tools are used to gather data from the internet. These tools allow you to connect to a website and acquire detailed information about how they run their page.
However, when you do web scraping, you’re gathering huge amounts of data. This often results in getting banned.
That’s why it’s best to use a proxy server to avoid this. Since it makes your IP address and location untraceable, it helps your bots examine your competitor’s websites. This, then, provides you with the results you want.
When you get all the data you need, you can use that information to create the best content possible. This means that you can:
- Combine relevant keywords,
- Determine high-quality backlinks to include in your content, and
- Determine which aspect of your website needs improvement.
3. Helps with link building
Backlinks are an important part of a successful SEO strategy for establishing a high-quality online presence. But it can be difficult to do so without disturbing Google’s algorithms.
Don’t worry, though. You can get away with this by using SEO proxy servers. When building backlinks, rotating proxies might help you generate a distinctive IP address. Crawlers will have a hard time tracking these links to a single source. This will prevent them from banning your IP address.
Photo by Cristian Dina from Pexels
Looking to boost your SEO strategy and market research activities? Smartproxy’s Search Engine Proxies are perfect for this job! These proxies work as a full-stack API, which requires no additional tools to gather SERP data 100% effectively, so you can focus on your optimization strategy without worrying about getting blocked. Plus, this SERP API is extremely fast – you can do market research quickly and easily. Ready to reach the next level? Try Smartproxy today!
4. Boosts social media marketing
If you generate enough participation on your posts, social media can help you increase website traffic. Communicating with your audiences on your posts can turn them into possible customers. Just imagine the number of would-be customers you can have with multiple social media accounts linking back to your website.
But having multiple accounts can get you tagged as spam when testing out a particular market. Your accounts may be banned if the website’s algorithm detects multiple activities from the same IP address.
Although creating a social media account is easy, the hard part would be getting back your current audience.
So, you have to use a proxy server to have a different IP address for each social media account you have. It aids in building an online presence without getting banned as you do so.
5. Helps with competitor analysis
Your competitors will not allow you to visit their websites to gather data. But with a proxy, you can analyze what SEO techniques your competitors use. The proxy helps you disguise yourself as a web crawler that is nothing out of the ordinary.
By using proxy servers, it’s safe to monitor your competitor’s activities. You can improve your SEO by using the information you have gathered, combined with your tested practices. This gives you an advantage over other businesses, allowing you to stay one step ahead of them.
Conclusion
You must use the best technique to optimize your website’s search engine. Knowing what keywords to put in your content helps you succeed in the market. But doing keyword research can potentially block or ban you from your competitor’s websites.
This is the reason why you need to use SEO proxy servers. Its role is not only limited to avoiding getting blacklisted. It also allows you to visit inaccessible websites because of geographical restrictions. It also helps you to scrape web pages for keywords that your rivals use, and leverage those keywords to your advantage.
