When it comes to SEO, proxies can be super useful in a variety of ways. Like always, with fast datacenter IPs, you can avoid all sorts of bans and geo-restrictions while scraping search results in order to optimize your keyword choice for further website revisions. Also, you can conduct in-depth competitive and backlink analyses backed by some robust residential proxies. And it is absolutely essential for rank tracking, where you can identify your brand’s standings in a certain geographical area.
In this article, we will take a deeper look at what proxies can be used for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices on a regular basis and review the proxy offerings from the market leaders related to this field. You will also enjoy our rundown of the top proxy providers of the best proxies for SEO, along their respective features and technical specs.
What are SEO Proxies and Why Are They Needed?
Actually, SEO proxies are common proxies used for SEO tasks. For those, who missed a piece of theory, proxy servers function as intermediaries between a user’s IP address and a target server, so that the latter perceives a proxy as an originator of the request. This technique allows to conceal user’s IP address.
In terms of SEO, such technology permits to bypass geo restrictions, optimize SEO analysis and marketing research, and imitate online activities as conducted in the region of the chosen proxy.
SEO proxies support wider SEO efforts linked to any location, and that’s without the hazard of bans and blocks by target platforms. At the same time, proxy rotation eliminates suspicions about too many requests and malicious bot behavior tracked by many websites.
What can you use SEO proxies for? The main options include:
- Competitor analysis: with SEO proxies, you can retrieve data on the structure of competitors’ websites, keywords, product descriptions and other marketing stuff you need to compare with your own marketing materials.
- Search by keywords and topics: you can use SEO proxies to simplify generation of long-tail topics by scraping keyword suggestions, or retrieve marketing structure and keys from search results.
- Rank tracking: SEO proxies help you obtain precise data about your ranking positions in search results.
- Website audit: SEO proxies are a useful auxiliary tool for website audit tasks. With smaller websites, you will in any way save your time due to automation tools. But proxies are a must for bigger projects, as without them large platforms just block the users, who try to scrape them without hiding.
Benefits of Using SEO Proxies
The main benefits of using SEO proxies include:
- Bypassing geo restrictions: with SEO proxies up and running, you can imitate presence in any location you need to conduct marketing research. This allows to localize your SEO efforts in accordance with the region upon your customer’s request, or obtain preciser results of SEO optimization for a specific area.
- Privacy and anonymity: proxies enhance your anonymity since they disguise your true IP. This adds a layer of security to your online activities protecting you against malicious online snoops and extra control.
- Enhanced data retrieval: proxies make data extraction safer and faster, as they help bypass speed restrictions installed by many platforms for users, who send too many requests. Since many providers implement IP rotation, you can escape the measures that degrade your connection speed when handling data extraction from certain platforms.
How Do SEO Proxies Work?
As already mentioned, a proxy server acts as a privacy buffer between your IP and the website you handle.
A user submits HTTP requests to the proxy, and the latter redirect the request to the target website on its own behalf. This way, the target website interprets the proxy server as the request originator, and is not supposed to find out, who actually sent the request.
In the field of SEO jobs, practical application of proxies may look as follows. Let’s assume you’ve got a task to identify issues with meta tags and titles on the customer’s website, hundreds of pages long. It will take months fulfilling this job manually. To save time, you will use the parser, which, however, can be banned by the customer’s website as a source of suspicious activities. That’s why you use proxy servers that rotate IPs and significantly reduce risks of blocks by the customer’s website.
The Best Types of Proxies for SEO
If your question is ‘Which would be the best proxy for SEO?’ Then, let’s consider one of the possible proxy use case scenarios in common for this field. This is significant because it might have an impact on your proxy budget, since for an SEO mission where it is possible to use a set of more affordable datacenter proxies, the use of geo-targeted static residential proxies may be redundant.
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies are based on IPs of the existing residential devices and route requests via valid connections of real user devices. Accordingly, websites treat such requests as those sent by existing users from certain locations. This type of proxy features improved validity and high reliability. Besides, they are a good fit for geo-specific tasks. On the other hand, they are slower and more expensive than other types of proxies.
Data Center Proxies
As it becomes clear from the name, datacenter proxies are generated in a datacenter. Their IPs are not connected to any real user gadgets or ISP hardware, that’s why they are usually cheaper than residential ones, but they are also easier to detect. So, they are quite suitable for SEO tasks performed on the websites with relatively low anti-scraping protection.
Mobile Proxies
As also understood from the term itself, mobile proxies use IPs of mobile devices and route requests via mobile connections. They are highly reliable and difficult to detect and ban. Their main drawback is a high price, but if you can fit them into your project budget, they can be quite useful for SEO tasks.
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Let’s do some reflecting on what how to choose the right proxies for SEO tasks.
So, keeping that in mind, for SEO proxying of search engines like Bing, you can survive with a good set of datacenter IPs. They will not cost you an arm and a leg and can get the job done related to scraping the SERP of these platforms.
For more protected websites like Google, you may need a much harder-to-detect set of residential proxies in your arsenal. This will let you avoid Captchas and scrape data continuously.
For labor-intensive missions, requiring a lot of traffic, you can even go for datacenter rotating proxies or residential IPs with rotating mechanisms. This will entirely depend on how important it is for your specific project to be geo-targeted. For certain locations, the use of even the cheapest residential proxy will be a must.
How to Choose the Best Proxy for SEO?
When choosing SEO proxies, take into account the key features a decent set of proxy servers should have, and additional services offered by the proxy provider. Among other things, find out, if a provider has 24/7 user support, a trial period and any perks users would appreciate, such as a mobile app, API access, AI workflows or dedicated solutions for parsing and scraping.
Key Features
When choosing proxies for your SEO tasks, keep in mind the following considerations.
- Residential and mobile proxies are a better choice for SEO tasks, as they imitate human-like behavior in a more reliable manner, and that’s why they are harder to detect and ban. Datacenter proxies are generated by servers, which makes them an easier detection target.
- When choosing a protocol, prefer HTTP(S)/SOCKS proxies as a widely-spread technical solution.
- Find out, if the provider you consider offers IP rotation that changes used IPs at the given time interval. This feature significantly reduces the risk of detection and ban.
- If you plan to complete SEO tasks for customers that run business in a specific region, explore the locations offered by the service provider: it’s better to choose proxies operating closer to the area you need. The best proxy providers drill locations down to the ZIP code level.
- Explore customization capabilities offered by the provider: the wider are the opportunities, the easier it will be to handle SEO tasks. Possible settings include rotation parameters, session duration, triggers and the like.
Provider Comparison
Whether you succeed in proxy-based SEO tasks or spend time and nerves on resolving technical issues depends, to a greater extent, on the service provider. When we choose a company we plan to give our cash to, we all want to find a business with high quality of service and readiness to react quickly to our problems.
So, keep in mind the following criteria to choose the best provider:
- 24/7 customer support. A decent provider is willing to help you all around the clock.
- High-quality IP addresses and rotation support. This is the core of proxy business, as, after all, it’s the IP quality and regular IP rotation that minimize risks of being banned.
- Flexible pricing packages. A provider should have a set of packages tailored for projects and customers of different scales and industries.
- Support of integration with SEO tools will considerably simplify your SEO tasks.
- A large pool of regularly updated proxies. The more proxies a provider has, the better. Another point to keep in mind here is geo coverage — if you plan to promote business or conduct marketing research in a specific area, it’s recommended to choose proxies closer to the region you need for work. Besides, when proxies are updated regularly, this guarantees higher privacy and connection quality for users.
- Adherence to ethical norms. Find out, if the provider confirms that its proxies were acquired in accordance with requirements of the law and ethics. This will save you from legal issues, and ensure proxy usage with minimum restrictions and risks.
- Speed and reliability. These are core technical characteristics, so we recommend you to compare provider’s claims and user reviews. After all, to complete your tasks successfully, you need uninterrupted and fast connection, otherwise you won’t get the results you expect.
Top 9 SEO Proxy Providers
And now, here are our top picks from the global market of the best rotating proxies and other proxy SEO-ready tools supplied by IP address providers around the world. Before you make a decision on approaching any of the mentioned companies for SEO proxies, you should remember that in most cases, you will have much better results in terms of IP performance if you get a one-to-one consultation from an account manager of the respective proxy provider. This way, you will be able to avoid any unpleasant experience with using servers during your operations. Also, any pricing information mentioned in the top list is subject to change due to the pricing policy changes of each specific proxy provider, so check with the companies on payment conditions prior to committing.
1. PrivateProxy
PrivateProxy offers different types of proxies tailored for a variety of purposes, use cases and locations, including proxies suitable to work with local SEO SaaS tools. These proxies are a perfect match for SERP and SEO tasks, and can cope well with large-scale projects. They are also adapted for SEO and marketing activities on such platforms as Google, Yelp and Facebook.
As for advanced technical characteristics, PrivateProxy solutions feature US and European locations, a wide pool and instant activation of proxies, unlimited bandwidth and connections and one free swap per month.
Besides, PrivateProxy support team works 24/7 and is always ready to adjust the solution to the customers’ needs. All proxies are private and are verified by proxy checkers.
PrivateProxy offer affordable pricing plans starting from $3 per month for datacenter static and $10 per month for residential rotating proxies for beginners. At the same time, their tariffs include offers for large-scale projects of 15 Million requests per month through backconnect proxies for $999.
Conclusion: one of the best solutions for SEO proxies, with a variety of pricing plans stretching from beginners to corporate large-scale projects at affordable prices.
2. Bright Data
A big player in the industry, Bright Data, offers over 72 million IPs in its residential pool alone, available from 195 countries, that can be suitable for SEO applications by individual and corporate users. It comes as a standard from this provider to enable very accurate targeting of IPs; you can fine-tune it to country, city, ZIP-code, or even ASN (carrier) level.
With proxies from Bright Data, you will have the hassle-free ability to overcome geo-restrictions and Captchas on all websites, topical for scraping. In order to engage in fast and reliable scraping with these IPs, you will have a proxy rotating mechanism at hand to change your IP for each connection or a certain scraping timeframe.
The quality of SEO proxies from Bright Data has been verified by thousands of companies that use the IPs on a daily basis. This list of users includes Fortune 500 names, and the success rate of proxies claimed by the provider is close to 99.99%. The types of servers supplied inside residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter proxies.
As for pricing, Bright Data can offer you both prepaid and pay-as-you-go plans. With the latter, you can start at $15 per GB of traffic, and prepaid plans start at $500 ($12.5 per GB).
Conclusion: One of the best choices in the industry for SEO proxies for enterprise-level clients with needs for scraping project expansion.
3. Oxylabs
With Oxylabs, you can untap an almost endless list of whitelisted IPs for SEO purposes. The provider can sell you residential, datacenter, ISP, or mobile proxies that would support all demanded protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS) tailored to your specific mission requirements. However, Oxylabs targets large corporate clients primarily, so if you are a novice proxy user or have a limited budget, you might have a feeling that it is too upscale for you.
As far as the proxy network, here we have a serious leader with 100M+ residential IPs alone available for all kinds of geo-targeted scraping missions. You can be country, state, or even ZIP-code-specific with such proxies to get accurate results for ad verification, brand exposure analysis, or review management.
Another great feature of Oxylabs is the availability of a wide range of APIs for proxy integration for various use cases. You can find a script or API for your particular mission and enjoy seamless integration with the most popular software solutions on the market. And all of these APIs come with detailed documentation to help you in the process.
Conclusion: Top quality, highly acclaimed proxies for SEO and marketing purposes, mostly for enterprise-level users.
4. Decodo
Decodo can be a one-stop-shop for SEO proxies if you are a small or medium business looking for such IPs. The provider has to offer over 125 million IPs in its network, ready to be deployed for SERP scraping via your own scripts or through Decodo’s API.
We can also say some good things about the user-friendly interface for buying and launching your proxies here. The customer support team has also gained some industrial acclaim and will do its best to keep your IPs up-and-running continuously.
As far as payment goes, you can choose from flexible plans to add new traffic when and where you need it. The Pay-as-you-go options for residential IPs start from $3.5/Gb with Decodo.
Proxy compatibility issues and integration concerns are also taken care of. You can use IPs from Decodo with any popular software out there. Just copy the proxy credentials into your script, code, or bot to start using the servers.
Conclusion: Impressive pool of residential IPs you can use for SEO scraping with flexible payment options.
5. IPRoyal
IPRoyal is another respectable proxy provider. It offers a wide product line of proxy servers that includes residential, datacenter, mobile and ISP proxies designed for web scraping, price monitoring, SEO and SERP scraping, gathering stock market data, and more.
Their solutions feature a global proxy pool, high-performance static IPs and proxies based on real user devices. IPRoyal technical capabilities are also worth mentioning: they offer unlimited bandwidth, top speed and precise targeting.
Besides, IPRoyal users can access such tools as a proxy tester and checker, video scraper API and an extension for Google Chrome and Firefox. All these add-ons simplify proxy handling and improve user experience.
As for pricing, IPRoyal provides flexible plans based on monthly subscriptions, payment per proxy or per GB of data. For example, if you plan to use mobile proxies, their prices vary from $117 per month up to $10 per day. But if datacenter proxies are enough for your tasks, you can stay within a budget of less than $2 per proxy.
Conclusion: different types of proxies suitable for all kinds of tasks, including SEO and marketing.
6. Storm Proxies
Storm Proxies mostly stake on US-based HTTP(S) residential proxies. On their website, you can also find general dedicated proxies and proxies tailored for the most popular platforms, so you can choose the solution you need right away. However, their proxies are limited only HTTP(S), without SOCKS or any other types of proxies.
If we start exploring kinds of proxies offered by Storm Proxies in greater detail, we can choose between private dedicated, backconnect rotating and residential rotating proxies. Supported locations depend on the type of proxies. For example, the available region for private dedicated proxies is the USA, while coverage for backconnect rotating proxies is global.
Since Storm Proxies position themselves as a supplier of premium-class products, prices for their proxies are relatively high. The cheapest options start from $10 charged monthly for 5 private proxies, and $39 paid for 40 threads of reverse backconnect rotating proxies, while the most expensive pricing plan amounts to $640 for 400 private proxies.
Conclusion: premium-class, high-quality proxies with restricted locations and flexible pricing plans.
7. MyPrivateProxy
MyPrivateProxy position themselves as an environment-friendly solution provider aimed to offer fully green services and using wind energy to power their proxy servers. MyPrivateProxy mostly stake on US proxies hosted on high-performance XEON servers.
They provide private proxies compatible with SEO tools, such as Answer Assault, ZenoPoster TweetAdder, Scrapebox, SenukeX, and others, as well as integration with Twitter and Facebook marketing tools. Generally, MyPrivateProxy offer proxies designed for “while hat” SEO and online marketing.
Among other advantages, we can state such characteristics as instant activation via email, high uptime and fast speed. Their pricing is also quite affordable and varies from one proxy for $2.49 up to large-scale projects that require more than two thousand proxies per month.
Conclusion: US-hosted affordable proxies specifically tailored for SEO and online marketing and attracting environmentally-conscious users.
8. NetNut
NetNut is one of the industry leaders that offers, first of all, proxies for AI models, BI & complex data pipelines.
The provider supplies residential, datacenter and mobile proxies, with its pool exceeding 80M proxies in 195 countries. NetNut proxies boast high speed of data collection, automatic rotation and zero IP blocks. They also provide dedicated solutions for SEO monitoring and SERP tracking. Another benefit NetNut users can enjoy is a user-friendly dashboard.
NetNut uses GB-based tariff model. They offer flexible pricing plans tailored to the needs of companies of all sizes, from starters using 13 GB per month up to operators of large projects exceeding 1 TB of data.
Conclusion: AI-oriented proxy provider with wide geo coverage and flexible pricing plans.
9. ProxyEmpire
ProxyEmpire is a solid mid-range proxy provider with an impressive pool of rotating residential proxies ready to be deployed for your SEO missions. The company claims only ethical sourcing of proxies, and with its geo-specific IPs you can target websites at the country, regional, and ASN (carrier) levels.
With every residential plan you order from the provider, you get premium-level tech support that will help you set up your proxies. This way, the provider differentiates itself from the market leaders with the largest proxy pools; here, you can expect more attentive customer care for proxy integration with any customized software that you might be using for SEO scraping.
Another distinctive feature of ProxyEmpire is its robust pool of mobile proxies. This can be interesting for those clients who are less concerned about the scraping speed than the accuracy of the process. With mobile proxies, you are much less likely to be detected by any anti-spam or anti-bot systems. This service is available in 170+ countries and can be useful for everyday SEO practices.
As for pricing, ProxyEmpire offers a paid trial from the provider for $1.97 or a pay-as-you-go plan for $15 per GB for rotating residential proxies.
Conclusion: Robust proxies for SEO practices, including some rare mobile IPs, coupled with client-oriented customer support.
Conclusion
Now, with this record chart of the best SEO proxies, you can choose the solution that matches your SEO tasks. And even if, for some reason, you would prefer another proxy provider, you can rely on provider features and characteristics we have described to precisely select the service that has tools you appreciate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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How can you use proxies for SEO?
You can use proxies for data gathering, conducting marketing research, and maintaining anonymity while accessing sites with anti-bot protection systems.
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What is the difference between datacenter and residential proxies when it comes to SEO?
With fast datacenter proxies and rotating DC servers, you will be able to conduct SERP scraping for SEO in a very prompt fashion. With residential proxies, you will be able to access specific geographical regions that interest you from the perspective of brand exposure.
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Can I use free proxies for SEO?
Free or public proxies are likely to cause all sorts of use failures due to their inadequate reliability and security. If your SEO practice is essential for your business, it makes sense to invest in private and dedicated proxies from experienced providers.
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How can proxies help with web scraping for SEO?
Your scraping activities will have a much lower chance of getting detected with proxies, distributing your requests to multiple IP accounts. This can be done through the use of rotating proxies or special IP-switching proxy-powered apps.
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How can I use proxies for local SEO?
With residential proxies, you will be able to access search results and content from specific geo regions. This should give you enough data for optimizing your SEO practices for a specific area.
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Is it legal to use proxies for SEO?
While using proxies, you should follow the terms of service of each site you approach. Unethical practices in this respect may lead to legal repercussions in some cases.
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