SEO Proxies – When You’re Serious about Your Search Ranking [VIDEO]
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very large industry, driving most online businesses. There are countless methods in practice today for doing the bread and butter of SEO: keyword research, audits, competition analysis, technical website optimization and rank tracking. Everyone is trying to rank higher in Google Search by hiring SEO agencies, consultants and developers. It’s no surprise there is a whole industry centered around growing visibility in search engines.
Manual SEO tools
Doing these things through an agency or a specialized SEO service is expensive. Countless great tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic and others offer their services for a hefty price. However, many other vendors sell ‘do it yourself’ SEO tools or methods anyone can test. These readily available software tools can help you automate SEO research and auditing processes, and gather the data you need. SEO proxies are what makes most of these tools really jump into gear.
The great thing about manual SEO tools is that you can do everything you need yourself and for less money. The bare minimum of what you need for keyword tracking with the help of SEO proxies is a script that can act as an SEO keyword tracker (or an SEO ranking tracker software) and reliable SEO proxies. Talking about SEO, we’ve just released SERP Scraping API that are designed to show you accurate data from Google in no time – read more about them below. Let’s move on to site audits.
Scrape SEO data with SERP Scraping API
Screen scraping is an industry standard for online data collection. You can use it for competitor research, search engine rank tracking, keyword research, price monitoring, technical SEO, site audits, and content analysis. For example, you can connect to every page on your competitor’s website and see what title tags or how many words they are using for SEO purposes. You can also scrape search page information to see meta description and page title information for a keyword you are targeting.
Smartproxy’s new addition called SERP Scraping API is designed for successful Google scraping. This is a scalable and easy-to-use data extraction tool, guaranteeing a 100% delivery rate either in raw HTML or parsed in JSON format! It supports high volume requests and it comes with country, state, and city-level targeting!
Now you can:
- Retrieve paid and organic data
- Get data about keyword rankings
- Track keyword performance
- Monitor SEO
- Monitor prices
Here comes the best part – you only have to pay for successful requests!
Site audits with SEO proxies
A website audit is something you can do on both your competitors, and your own site. To do this, you have to crawl and scrape the information on the website. This means that in some cases you will have to open many pages, sending hundreds or even thousands of requests to the server of your target website. Do this with an automated script like ScrapeBox and you are bound to have your IP blocked.
A rotating SEO proxy network server will make getting website audit data a breeze. Each of those requests you send will come through a different residential IP and will never alert the target server. You might also need proxies to scrape your own site, if it is protected by your hosting service provider.
Set up a script to gather data you need into a simple CSV file, jack it into a backconnect proxy to rotate IPs for each connection, and you will have all the raw data for any site audit in minutes!
Research competitors through an SEO proxy service
When you do SEO research of a competitor, you can focus on dozens of details or questions which may be directly relevant to other business tasks:
- Is your competitor writing clickbait titles and descriptions?
- Which topics do they focus on most and why?
- What is their content strategy on-site?
- Which is the top-performing and low-performing content? This way you do not make the same mistakes, but rather learn from them.
- How frequently do they publish new content?
- Which pages are they trying to optimize and why?
- What is their interlinking strategy?
- Which keywords are they optimizing for, and get most conversions with?
- Does their site rank higher than yours for a keyword?
- Does any link from their site on Google redirect visitors to another page?
- Which sites are they linking out and why? Maybe they are their business partners?
- What structured data are they using on-site, and which rich results they are aiming for in search results?
- Do they use external media content (Youtube, Vimeo, or other audio/video platforms) on their pages?
- Which pages or documents are they trying to hide from search bots’ eyes and why?
- Is there any data you would like to extract from their site to make data-driven decisions?
All of these questions and related data can be accessed with a detailed competitor website crawl. You can use tools like ScreamingFrog SEO Spider or ScrapeBox, or order a cloud-based service like DeepCrawl or JetOctopus to do this for one-time or regular payment. If you are a talented programmer, you can even write a scraping script yourself. For example, suppose you feel comfortable with Python Web Programming. In that case, you may check Scrapy or BeautifulSoup – some of the most popular open-source and collaborative frameworks for extracting the data from websites, and build your custom scraper.
Beware – if you use WhiteHatBox or ScrapeBox, your IP can tell the competitor who you are and inform them that (and how) you are researching their business. As you probably know, staying anonymous with SEO proxies is very important in high competition local and global markets. A rotating proxy with a backconnect node will set a random unique IP address for each of your connections. SEO backconnect proxies will do the trick if you want to crawl and scrape your competitor or even spy on them without showing any suspicious activity.
SEO proxies for backlinks
Posting in all kinds of online communities can boost engagement, public visibility, and acquire new clients. SEO proxies can make this process easier – now you can automate your posting in various forums, communities, and comment sections. The backlinks you acquire will help you with your search engine rankings. However, don’t overdo it – this tactic will most likely be used less and less in the near future. Have you heard of Search Experience Optimization? This is a user-centric approach that focuses on real people rather than search engines. Your website will also need to be adjusted for user intent, mobile viewing, and more. The bots scrape, but the people buy.
Rank tracking with proxies
Search engine optimization is a never-ending process of tests and experiments. You must have some way of measuring your results to monitor your progress. You can measure traffic growth, but you also have to know if your ranking for targeted keywords and countries has improved.
Keyword ranking measurements should be done at a set interval. This means that you will run a search engine real-time result scrape every week or month for every one of your target keywords and locations. Don’t forget to load up your proxies before starting to save time and avoid getting blocked by the search engines.
Check search engine ranking in any country with local proxies
Ah, e-commerce campaigns! Do you localize your website? Want to check how it looks in search results in the countries you target? Use SEO proxy services with location targeting to test any search query from a country and see if everything looks and works well. This is a lot cheaper than hiring local QA services testers.
However, if you want to rise in the search result rankings in other countries, you have to do more than create localized content campaigns and optimize your site. In essence, you will have to go through your whole SEO strategy for each country (targeting keywords, researching competitors, etc.)
To track how you rank in the results for another country, you must use an IP address from that country to see the most precise results. A geo-targeted proxy network will let you use random IPs from a specific location and track your search engine ranking in any country.
Level up your e-commerce business and start using residential proxies with location targeting to track search rankings in any country.
Simulate traffic through SEO proxies
Warning: this section goes into the very gray zone of SEO, so please be very careful with this. If it’s possible, it’s better to avoid risking it without proper knowledge of how search engines and their web spam teams work, and without experienced SEO consultancy. But we need to mention such tactics just because your competitors are most likely using it to outrank you right now (if you work with top competitors, of course).
Simulated traffic emerged from the fact that one of the major factors that determine your site’s ranking is the click-through rate and dwell time. To put it simply: the more users click your site in the search results and spend a lot of time in your site, the better it will rank in future results for the same search queries. This is why most businesses simulate a good part of their traffic, bumping up their click-through rate and dwell time for SEO.
If you are trying to simulate traffic, use a web automation script like GSA or WhiteHatBox to enter a search term into Google or Bing, scroll to a result from your site and click it. Then make the script browse your site for a while. This will tell search engines that your website has useful information for that query. Remember to clear the cache and change the browser’s signature for each request, as well as rotate the IP address.
Again, this practice is frowned upon by search engines, so use it with big caution and test it out on a secondary and less important website first (major step!). Search engines like Google, Bing and Yandex catch such activities quite easily if you do not know exactly how to do every single step. Believe us, those big brothers are very clever these days, and will filter your fake clicks with ease, even if you ask real people to make those simulated actions. And after that, manual action will likely follow. Please consult experienced specialists before you think about building your SEO strategy based on these methods. You have been warned.
Best SEO proxies: fast, anonymous, unlimited threads, location targeting
SEO agencies and SEO specialists alike will tell you that you need a reliable, anonymous proxy network to really put your SEO into gear. Here is what you will need:
Fast SEO proxies
Scraping, crawling, site auditing and traffic simulation relies on the proxy speed. Not to toot our own horn, but we have one of the fastest residential proxies in the market. Our IPs response rate don't exceed 0.5 seconds! Of course, you may try other providers too – you can always come back for quality SEO Proxies at Smartproxy.
Unlimited proxy threads for SEO
A proxy network with unlimited threads will let you send as many concurrent connection requests as you need. Every connection has a separate IP address, so you can scrape, crawl, audit quickly and at scale. We’re not bragging when we say that our proxy network is unlimited. Because it is! Forty million residential IPs with unlimited threads can more than satisfy your SEO needs.
Location targeted SEO proxies
You can do every SEO action for separate countries to see how your campaigns and your competition look like in the EU vs the US, for instance. Again, it’s no coincidence that we offer location targeting for over 190 countries and cities worldwide! Add 50 USA states too.
Smartproxy is where you can buy the best SEO proxies. Contact us now to find out more.
About the author
James Keenan
Senior content writer
The automation and anonymity evangelist at Smartproxy. He believes in data freedom and everyone’s right to become a self-starter. James is here to share knowledge and help you succeed with residential proxies.
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