Proxies are actively used by SEO-specialists to circumvent restrictions imposed on the software that sends a lot of bulk requests to the search engines and web resources. Such restrictions are not a special fight against SEO-specialists, they protect sites from spammers and DDOS. Proxies in SEO are necessary primarily for tracking positions on SERP and keyword collection for building a semantic core.
What is a proxy?
A proxy is a remote server through which you can reroute your traffic. When you’re accessing a website directly without any additional tools, the destination server can see your IP address. Hence, it can see all the data about your precise location, and even the operating system and the browser you’re using.
If you use a proxy while accessing a certain website, your connection goes through the proxy server and only then reaches the destination server. Thus, the site you’re accessing can see the IP address of the proxy server, not yours. This gives you a lot more room to play when optimizing your website for the search engines.
When to use proxies for SEO?
Keyword research
Many tools for semantics collection support proxies to provide faster collection speeds. The price of different paid online services usually includes the cost of proxies.
The list of keywords may consist of hundreds or even several thousand keywords. Once it is ready, you need to check their search volume and competition, as well as other SEO indicators. There are no issues with checking the features using a single IP. But to determine the competition objectively, you will have to parse all the search results for the keys you are interested in. Also, you will need to get additional data on competitors from services such as Ahrefs, Alexa, Moz or Semrush. Therefore, due to the limitations of some services on the amount of information issued to one IP, you need to use a proxy server.
The same thing happens during parsing site positions in SERP and mass checking SEO indicators. You will especially need proxies when working with a large number of projects. Then for a one-time check of the positions of all the sites you have to “kill” 1000-1500 proxies.
Level up your competitor research
Thorough research of your competitors is key to a successful SEO campaign. Usually, SEO specialists gather the backlinks of a rival to see which ones are the most useful. This information allows professionals to build an even better scheme of backlinks.
Many tools will do backlink research for you. However, they create a large volume of inquiries. And you should remember such activity is very similar to a DDOS attack. That’s why most servers block IP addresses that exhibit such a behavior.
But if the requests are sent from different IPs, this activity becomes way less suspicious. That’s why you need proxies to research the backlink schemes of your competitors.
Another thing you can do is to try accessing the website of your rival from different locations to see what special proposals does it have for residents of various cities or even countries. Fortunately, you don’t need to travel to do this research. You just need proxies from certain locations, and you’re ready to dive into the process.
Scrape data without interruptions
Data scraping is an essential part of SEO. The more information you have, the more strategic your decisions become. Scrapers naturally create numerous requests that can be taken by the destination server for a DDOS attack. But actually, most website owners and search engines try to protect themselves and their users from scraping. It multiplies your chances to get your access denied. To avoid it, one of the greatest solutions is the residential proxy services like Infatica, that provide proxies sourced from real consumers across dozens of countries. This is also a good solution for auto-posting software, when anonymity of the proxy and their number is especially important. So here you need some magic, residential proxies to make it look like actions are performed by real person + safe timeouts and anti-captcha service.
Obviously, if you use proxies, you will never face any restrictions. The only thing you will need to do is to set up your scraper so that it rotates the proxies properly. Then you can be sure nothing will stop you from acquiring the desired data.
Check your ad campaigns
It’s useful to see if your ads are displayed correctly for users from different locations. The poorly done targeting will ruin all your efforts for sure. That’s why you need to be totally sure that you did everything correctly, and your ads reach the target audience. Using proxies, you can see how well did you set up your ad campaign.
Also, with proxies, you can check if promotions and especially coupons work well on your e-commerce site. You can try accessing it from different IPs to make sure all users will have the same experience using your special proposals.
Obviously, you can research ad campaigns and special offers for certain locations your competitors have. To do that, you will need to access the website of your rival using a proxy from a required area.
What proxies should you choose?
Once you try to choose the provider, you will notice that there are a lot of types of proxies out there. Which ones are suitable for your SEO needs?
Public proxies
These proxies can be really appealing because they’re free. But we kindly recommend you to stay away from them because they’re not just unreliable but quite dangerous. Public proxies are available to virtually any Internet users. And a lot of them use such proxies with malicious intentions. Hence, there are a lot more chances that you will get banned using public proxies. Also, they can be infected with malware that can spread over your network.
Shared proxies
You will have to pay for these but not too much. Shared proxies are reliable and safe, and they get rotated among other users who have access to the pool. Therefore, it’s the best option for data scraping since your IP address can change with each request.
Most trustworthy providers like Infatica offer several types of shared proxies:
- Datacenter. These proxies come from a data center and are the cheapest solution. They’re quick and work well for SEO purposes if managed correctly. However, they’re easier to detect, so your chances to get banned rise.
- Residential. Such proxies are a real remote device that has an authentic IP address issued by an ISP. Therefore, since the IP is unique, it’s almost impossible to detect that the connection is rerouted through the proxy. Of course, residential proxies are more expensive.
- Mobile. The most expensive type of proxies. They offer IPs of mobile devices. Such proxies are excessive for most SEO needs. But you can use them to see what mobile visitors see.
If you choose shared proxies, remember to set up the rotation of IPs so that your activity doesn’t look suspicious to the destination servers. However, Infatica offers an automatic rotation of IP addresses, so with this provider, you won’t have to worry about this detail.
Private proxies
If you get private proxies, you will be the only using them while you’re renting them. Thus, you will have the most anonymous connection you can possibly get. Private proxies are extremely reliable and fast. However, they’re quite expensive.
Consider that you can’t be good with just a couple of proxies – you will need a solid pool. Otherwise, sooner or later, servers will detect your suspicious activity and ban you. The number of IPs you require depends on the complexity of your project. You can consult your provider to figure out how many you need.
Bottom line
Optimizing websites for search engines is not an easy job to do. However, it can be very interesting. If you want the results to be rewarding, you should implement proxies into your workflow. Which of these types of proxies better to use – depends on your specific task. Just don’t try to save some money getting public proxies – they will do more harm than good.