How are Proxies Used for SEO?
Anastasia Zatonskaya
Anastasia Zatonskaya Published: 2024/05/03

What Is An SEO Proxy?

Those engaged in brand promotion know that SEO campaign is a project intended to optimize a website in a way that improves its rankings in Google, Bing or another search engines.

These efforts rely on many different components, such as keyword research, web audit, SEO analysis, and many more. Marketing experts recommend including these actions in the long-term SEO campaign: focusing on long tail keywords; optimizing the keyword strategy; choosing proper keywords; determining the golden middle between big search volume and low competition; using detailed SEO analysis for KPI monitoring.

Sounds like a complicated endeavor. Inter alia, to run such campaigns successfully, you’ll need protection from search engine bans, security and reliability when scraping the SEO data you need. 

That’s where SEO proxies — intermediaries that hide your IP address and deliver online anonymity — will come handy. They enable high speed and safety during such tasks as crawling, researching keywords, checking ranking, link building or tracking marketing activities of other businesses.

What Are the Benefits of Using SEO Proxies?

Proxies play an important role in pursuing marketing and SEO strategies. They improve efficiency and safety of marketing tasks and widen technical opportunities marketing experts can use to reach their goals.

Geo-referenced keyword monitoring. Keyword-based content raking varies depending on location. Besides, to get the 360°-view of their marketing landscape, users should also track keyword and content performance dynamics. When monitoring marketing metrics with reference to different geolocations, they get the end-to-end visualization of how effectively their content works.

Analysis of the competitors’ marketing. SSO is an extremely dynamic area, where rules can change fast. Search engines frequently modify their algorithms underlying search engine result page rankings, which makes companies often monitor a better-performing content through the competitor analysis. Due to proxies, they can analyze content without revealing their identities.

Safe web scraping for SEO audit. Businesses often adhere to automatic scraping of the data they need. Thanks to proxies, they can rely on multiple IPs and avoid bans. Besides, premium-class proxy management also supports IP rotation that delivers additional security and anonymity.

Better placement of ads. In many cases, advertising requirements vary from country to country. With proxies, marketing professionals can pursue their region-specific advertisement goals staying where they are. 

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Types of Proxies For SEO Scraping

Traditionally, it is recommended to use residential proxies: for the accessed website, they look like an ordinary user surfing the web, and are harder to discover and ban. However, consider various proxy types carefully, and contact the support of your proxy provider to clarify any doubts.

Proxy TypeCharacteristicsAdvantagesDisadvantages
Datacenter ProxiesGenerated in a datacenter.  With IPs not connected to any ISP or residential equipment, they are easier to detect. Most suitable to scrape websites without high anti-scraping protection. Often used for market research, e-commerce, and competitor analysis tasks.– Fast- Efficient- Cheap- Good for tasks that deal with a large-volume scraping and don’t need to bypass anti-scraping protection– Easier to detect and ban – Cope worse with anti-scraping or anti-bot systems
Residential ProxiesRely on IPs of the existing residential devices and thus permit routing the crawling requests via valid residential connections. Websites treat their requests as those sent by existing users from a certain location.Good for handling websites that support advanced anti-scraping measures. Often used for scraping tasks aimed to ensure high anonymity and success rate.– Improved validity- Support IP rotation- More reliable- Better for geo-specific scraping– Slower- Relatively expensive
ISP Proxies(residential status proxies)Based on IPs that rely on datacenter servers, though  registered to ISPs. Much faster than ordinary residential proxies.Not as numerous as common static proxies, but reliable to such an extent that you can trust them for years.– Fast- Very reliable- Great for accessing region-restricted websites and collecting data from strictly protected websites- Suitable to monitor SEO rankings and collecting marketing information from various regions

– Not so numerous- Available only in some countries-Don’t support IP rotation
Mobile ProxiesProvide IP addresses of mobile devices with 3G, 4G, and 5G connectivity. Help route requests via mobile connections, which enable the ultimate legitimacy. They are more reliable, encounter fewer bans and verification prompts.– Highly legitimate- Perfect for mobile testing- Great for handling social media platforms– More expensive- Slower

How To Scrape For Better SEO

There are plenty of modern tools to choose from for marketing users that need to enhance SEO by means of web scraping. Depending on your coding skills, you can either develop your own customized solution, run scripts, or rely on the ready-to-use software:

In GitHub, you can find such tools as NachoSEO, a Node.js web scraper that allows scraping SEO elements either set by default or customized by users, and Web Scraper for SEO Marketers based on Selenium and BeautifulSoup. The latter tool you retrieves such details as page title, headers, meta keywords and descriptions, internal links and more.

Apify, a platform where developers build web scraping tools, offers all in all 113 SEO solutions. They cover a wide area of application, from auditing SEO and scraping results in Google search engine up to checking broken links, generating traffic, collective reviews from travel industry websites or scraping social media, such as TikTok, X or Pinterest. 

Apify’s SEO Audit Tool helps find out many SEO details about the examined website: content length and word statistics; whether the webpage has Google Analytics correctly set up; whether the website has any no-follow / broken links or poorly optimized images; data from JSON-LD specifications and much more.

Google Trends Scraper scans Google search queries and helps understand rising and lowering tendencies related to used keywords and content. The tool exports deliverables to JSON, CSV, XML, and Excel formats, supports task scheduling and integration with other software.

 In Google Workplace Marketplace, you can install the Keywords in Sheets add-on designed to unleash keyword search capabilities inside Google Sheets. The tool supports checking status code, redirected links, handling keywords with reference to any location and so on. Alternatively, you can use Keywords in Sheets script to discover any technical SEO issues. 

Users, who are good at Python, can opt for SerpScrap 0.13.0. It is a Python-based SEO scraper that knows how to extract URL, title, snippet, ads, shopping teasers and other details from results of major search engines. Retrieved information can be exported into CSV file or saved as screenshot.

Another SEO scraper with multiple capabilities is A-Parser designed to retrieve  information from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, Baidu and others search engines. It supports SERP Scraping that includes information about links, anchors and snippets; collects keywords and suggests search country, domain and language; checks website ranking. 

How Can SEO Proxies Improve Your Website’s Rankings?

Most users don’t usually “turn the page”: everyone takes what they see in the limelight of the first Google page. That means that websites with lower rankings are not so noticed and have poorer website traffic. But the problem of website promotion can be solved, if we correctly use SEO proxies to improve the website’s rankings.

Relevant content and keywords. SEO proxies enable automated web scraping that will help you thoroughly analyze and select the keywords of adequate frequency — not too frequent to be lost among competitors and not too rare to be irrelevant for the search query.

Mobile user experience. Today, 92.3% of internet users get online from their smartphones. So, it is important to examine mobile user experience in detail, and SEO proxies are an invaluable tool in pursuing this task. With proxy servers, marketing professionals can simulate queries from mobile gadgets, obtain better insights on what search results mobile users are displayed and optimize websites for mobile platforms accordingly.

Speed. Your website speed explicitly affects SEO rankings, as Google considers, how fast a website responds to requests, in its search ranking algorithms. Besides handling the traffic, SEO proxies can also cache data, thus accelerating webpage loading. 

How To Find The Best SEO Proxy Service

The most reasonable approach to choosing the best service is to look for the proxy provider with customizable solutions, 24/7 live support and proxy verification. Pay attention to SEO proxy providers that offer:

  • Different types of private proxies, including residential and datacenter static or rotational proxies;
  • Professional support services that quickly delivers assistance through the team of account managers;
  • Proxy checkers that come up with the best IPs to suit your use case;
  • Proxies suitable for all business purposes, web scraping and unique use cases.

Final Thoughts

SEO proxies are a necessary prerequisite for marketing professional wishing to improve the SEO rankings of the websites they are in charge of. Using SEO proxies, they can automate and streamline web scraping that is so necessary for keyword and link analysis, improving the website speed, competitor analysis and website ranking monitoring.

Today, you can choose from a wide range of tools designed to meet the needs of diverse customers with varied goals, budget and technical capabilities.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.

  • Is it legal to use SEO proxies?

    Proxy servers are just the tool that can be used in good or bad faith, as any other tool. It is legal to apply them to publicly available data in most jurisdictions. However, to be on the safe side, you can always consult a lawyer about specific requirements of a certain country.

  • Can you use free proxies?

    Through free proxies don’t cost money to their users, they will have to pay with quality, reliability and lost peace of mind. It’s much more prudent to pay a reasonable amount of money for high-quality product designed to solve customer’s business tasks with proper level of reliability and confidentiality.

  • Do you have to be advanced in coding to use SEO proxies?

    Not necessarily. You can rely on the off-the-shelf software products that are fast and easy to use.

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