As your success starts with being visible to your potential customers, search engine optimization is a must for every business today. Still, sometimes it may be overwhelming as you need to keep an eye on ranks and competitors, ensure a positive user experience, correct technical configuration, and many more things—all at the same time. Over and above, you have to do it daily and react quickly if there are any changes. To speed up and complete all those tasks, avoid captchas and unnecessary personalization, and target a particular location, proxies are used. In this article, we discuss five main optimization challenges proxies can help you overcome to stay on top of SERPs.

What is SEO, and why is it challenging?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of improving your website in a way that search engines rank it higher on a search engine results page (SERP), so you get more organic, unpaid traffic. As less than 5% of people look further than the first page of search results and even on this page, the first result gets a 25% click-through rate (CTR), while the 10th result gets only a 2.5% CTR, SEO isn’t just a race for fun but a crucial necessity. For businesses, visibility means you get customers attention and, in the end, profit, development, and competitive advantage.

However, SEO has its own challenges. First of all, search engines update their algorithms regularly, and it may take time to figure out what parameters Google or Bing pay attention to now while ranking pages. As a result, your position on SERP may change in a blink of an eye, and what helped you rank high yesterday may bring you down today. It means you need to always be on the lookout regarding your rankings and be ready to quickly adjust your SEO strategy. The second problem logically follows: you have to automate ranking monitoring and all SEO processes as much as possible, as it’s hopeless to try doing it manually and still effectively.

What do proxies have to do with that?

Proxies stand out of all the tools, as they are quite universal instruments and can help you with numerous SEO tasks. They act as mediators between your browser and the target server and communicate with the latter one on your behalf. Technically, you don’t interfere with the target server at all. In the process, your real IP address stays hidden behind a proxy’s IP. As IP provides a way to figure out more info about you, for example, your location, keeping your IP covered cuts ways to find out more about you. Let’s take a closer look at how it is useful for SEO optimization tasks.

Proxies for rank monitoring

Rank monitoring is a key SEO metric and a lighthouse at the same time. It helps you judge how effective your SEO strategy is. It’s necessary to monitor ranks daily and get accurate data. At the same time, it’s hard to do so only by googling relevant keywords. Search engines try to deliver customised search results to satisfy users. As a result, your search history, cookies, preferences, location, and fingerprints influence what you see on SERPs. You get personalised—read biassed—search results that don’t show your real rankings. Moreover, search engines often put IP limits on the number of queries that you can make using the same IP. If you reach this limit, you may experience captchas. As you utilise automatic tools for rank tracking, it may cause problems because tools cannot think like humans and tick captchas. As a result, you cannot estimate your SEO strategy or see that your rankings dropped, and you have to fix it. Staying oblivious may result in a loss of customers and profit and make you weak in the face of competition.

Proxies save the day by helping you get impersonal search results. When you channel traffic via a proxy server, your IP and location are invisible. Search engines cannot customise search results, so you see unspecialized SERPs. By leveraging proxies from different locations, you can see SERPs as people in those areas would. Rotating proxies solve the problem of request limits. When you use them, your queries are distributed among numerous addresses, so search engines don’t understand that the same person makes all the requests. With all of that, you can check rankings without captchas, get real, detached data, and adjust your SEO strategy to always stay at the top of the SERPs.

Proxies for link building

When other companies or blogs mention you in their sources, search engines think that your content is really engaging and useful, so they rank you highly on the SERPs. That’s why building a solid backlink profile lies within your priorities. At the same time, Google may penalise you for building backlinks from the same IP. Also, you may outreach potential partners and reach the request limit, altering search engines’ security systems. Not to mention that search engines may provide you with personalised and localised search results when you try to find new backlink opportunities. It’s especially inconvenient when you want to expand your authority and need to contact foreign businesses.

However, you can avoid all this headache with proxies. A trustworthy provider will offer you a vast pool of IPs, so you can disperse your link-building activities across numerous IPs. You can also switch between addresses while networking with possible partners. All of this will make your actions seem natural, so search engines won’t suspect you’re building backlinks and punish you with captchas. That’s the reason why proxies are irreplaceable when using automated tools for link building, as they not only help you avoid detection but also scale up the process as you can utilise several addresses at once. Proxies also help you reach businesses in particular locations or, on the contrary, avoid any personalization. It means you can effectively acquire backlinks without penalties and improve your ranking.

Proxies to conduct competitor analysis

Analysing competitors isn’t something new in marketing. However, such analysis may be helpful for SEO optimization as well. You can analyse competitors’ backlinks, keywords, and content. It may provide you with valuable insights about gaps in your SEO strategy and give you fresh ideas about what else to improve to rank higher. At the same time, competitor analysis isn’t something you can do without additional tools. Businesses are aware of their rivals’ attempts to analyse their websites, so they may try to prevent it by utilising anti-bot systems. Not to mention “classic” problems like altering websites by sending too many requests from the same IP or the necessity to get detached content.

Proxies are the legal way to stay anonymous while online. As you use not your IP but a proxy’s address, it becomes harder to trace traffic back to you or to identify you. Competitors’ websites won’t understand who you really are and will treat you as a regular customer, showing you content, links, and everything else as it is. You also won’t see captchas, as with proxies, it’s hard to understand that all requests come from the same source. That’s what you aim for.

Proxies for monitoring the user experience

Ensuring your visitors see your content and visuals as intended, regardless of location and type of device they use, is one more aspect worth your attention. User friendliness has a significant impact on ranking. Search engines now take into consideration accessibility for users with disabilities and the time visitors spend on your pages. It means you have to make your website convenient as well as intuitive in terms of navigation.

Proxies are the tool to monitor all the aspects listed above. Using them, you can simulate real user behaviour and see your website through your visitors’ eyes. You can access your pages from different locations and use different types of proxies to simulate searches from different types of devices. You can also conduct A/B testing and test different content and visuals to figure out the best variant to show to your audience. With all of that, you can sleep well knowing your website is ready to welcome customers, and search engines have nothing to rank you lowly for.

Proxies for technical SEO

Not only user experience influences rankings, but your website has to be technically well-configured so search engine crawlers are able to visit and index your pages so they can show your website on SERPs. It’s important, as search engines cannot show unindexed pages on SERPs. Without indexation, search engines actually don’t know that such a page exists at all.

Proxies help you simulate search engine crawlers such as Googlebot and scrape your website as if from different locations and IPs. This way, you can see how crawlers interpret your XML sitemap and identify and solve potential problems like syntax errors, broken links, missing pages, or poor sitemap structure that may prevent bots from crawling and indexing your pages. It also helps you ensure that search engines see the latest version of your website, that they index new pages, and that old pages aren’t shown on SERPs. Imitating search engine crawlers with proxies is also good for validating robots.txt files. Those files contain instructions for crawlers about what pages they should scrape and index. It’s important that files work properly and are accessible from different locations so search engine bots receive the correct directives. If your website relies heavily on JavaScript and AJAX rendering to display dynamic content, proxies can help check whether that content is shown correctly. Browsers may have broader capabilities compared to search engines, so it’s important to ensure that dynamic content is indexed correctly. It all contributes to your position on SERPs.

Why not free rank checkers? Why not free proxies?

As SEO optimization isn’t a one-time action but a part of the daily routine, it’s also a serious expense item. Naturally, it may be tempting to use free rank checkers, free proxies, free competitor analysis tools, and every other free tool you may get your hands on. However, it might cost you twice in the end. Such instruments don’t give you full information regarding your real rank. They often have a limited number of keywords they can track, especially high-competitive and long-tail keywords. They often lack advanced features, such as the ability to monitor ranks from different locations. They may not update their data often enough, so you get out-of-date info. As a result, you don’t know your real rank and can’t fix problems or adjust your SEO strategy if something is wrong. On top of that, you never know who manages free tools. They say that if you don’t pay for the product, you’re the product. Free rank checkers and proxy servers may collect and use your data in a way that may pose a danger to your anonymity and security.

What factors should I consider while choosing proxies?

There are several important criteria to pay attention to while deciding on a proxy provider:

Legitimacy

Ethically-sourced whitelisted proxies not only benefit your activities but also contribute to your reputation and prevent you from being associated with illegal activities like spreading spam or viruses. Choose a provider who respects the law and obtains proxies in a legal way. For example, DataImpulse earns its IP addresses via an app of its own development. People download that app, opt-in to sell us a share of their traffic, and get money in return. We then offer you that traffic. This is a completely fair practice to get proxy addresses. As we pay our partners, in exchange, we can set some criteria that are obligatory to meet. By doing so, we ensure that you get safe-to-use proxies that aren’t blocked or known for spreading viruses.

Size of a pool of IPs

The more addresses you have available, the more you can diversify your activities and avoid altering anti-bot systems. So pay attention to the number. At DataImpulse, you can have more than 5 million IPs at hand. You can also check how many addresses are online and ready-to-use right now.

Number of locations

For SEO optimization, it’s important to imitate activities from different locations. Logically, you need to have proxies from different areas—as many areas as possible. For instance, you can have proxies from 195 countries at DataImpulse. It means that you can simulate searches and track ranks for numerous locations without worrying about being unable to reach the necessary areas.

Amount of connection threads

Connection threads allow you to use numerous IPs simultaneously, scaling up your activities. It’s equal to using several devices at once. It helps you complete your tasks faster and get the required data in no time. DataImpulse provides you with 2000 connection threads with no additional charges, so you can get the job done without waiting too long.

To wrap up

SEO optimization not only helps you stay visible to customers, but in the process of scrutinising your ranks and competitors, you get valuable insights about what else to do to make your products and services better and more meaningful. Proxies, in turn, can enhance the SEO optimization process and help you track your rank, adjust your content, and the technical side of the website while forgetting about captchas, rate limits, and undesired personalization. At DataImpulse, you will get not only 1-second response-time IPs but also a lot of additional features like country-targeting that will help you in your SEO tasks. We’re in touch 24/7 and not robots, but humans help you in live chats. Click on the “Try now” button in the top-right corner of the screen to get started, or use a widget in the bottom-right corner to ask our support agents all the questions you are interested in.