SEO proxies could be that one missing piece of your business’s marketing puzzle.
They’re the unsung heroes of data collection and search engine monitoring.
Without them – nothing would work.
Here’s a guide to SEO proxies to help you get started.
What are SERPs?
Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs, are what a search engines present you when you search for something on the internet. Soon after pressing enter or clicking search (and assuming you’re connected to the internet) you may see some ads that people have paid for to be at the top of the results.
Next, you may see some videos or images that are relevant to the keyword(s) you entered. Finally, you see the search results that the search engine thinks will satisfy your query, from most relevant to the least. Generally, you can narrow down your results by using more keywords that further describe what you’re looking for.
If you want your audience to find you on the internet through a search engine, you want to use keywords that clearly define who you are, but also how someone looking for you would describe you.
Let’s say you provide residential proxies to businesses who want to optimize their website to rank higher on search engine results. You’d want to think about the needs of that business and use keywords on your website they may use search for like “Is SERP Ranking Critical For Your Business” and “rank higher on search engines.”
Then, search engines like Google and Bing can sift through your website with web crawlers and present you to people that seem to be looking for information that you have.
But it’s not that easy to end up on the top of search results anymore because everyone’s doing it. In fact, you probably need to hire full-time professionals to help you rank for competitive keywords.
And even then…
How do you rank higher for SERPs?
Ranking higher on search engines is a whole emerging field. Not only does the work of search engine optimization (SEO) carry a huge burden of uncertainty, the target is always moving. In other words, you don’t know if your strategy will work until it does (or doesn’t), and search engines change their algorithms frequently enough so that you have to always adjust some of those strategies to stay effective.
But some things remain constant like the tasks of optimizing for keywords, developing backlink authority, technical optimization, and producing GREAT content.
Let’s look at them in detail.
Keyword Optimization
We touched on keyword optimization already. The idea is to be an effective communicator. You want to say everything you need to say, but not too much. If you are too wordy, then your important keywords and messages are lost in the ramblings.
So you will want to find out what people search for when they need what you have.
You can use SEO tools and resources like AHREFS and SEMRush that show you what people are searching for. For example, someone who needs residential proxies may not search for just residential proxies. They may want something to mask their IP address while they operate a sneaker bot or web scraper. In that case, someone may search for “how to use a web scraper without getting blocked.”
These services above will identify related keyword searches that Google or Bing recognize as matches to their client’s search. You can then use them in your webpage content to optimize the keywords.
There are also applications that automate this process. Services like SurferSEO or Frase made it so you can just enter your topic or product, and they auto-generate the keywords you should use to rank higher. They also give you an idea of how your keyword optimization compares to competitors.
Another way to find keywords is through web scraping. Some people call it SEO scraping or search engine scraping. The goal is the same thing as SEO web services like SEMRush, except that you can customize your searches and guarantee that you have the most recent results. This comes in handy for monitoring your website’s keyword performance, which is often referred to as SEO monitoring. That way, you can make content adjustments and quickly improve your SERP ranking.
SEO scraping can be done through web scaper APIs like Scrapebox or Octoparse, or with custom scraping scripts from an experienced software developer.
Backlink Authority
Backlink authority is a measure of the quality of links pointing to a website. The more quality sites link to your website, the more credibility, and authority your page will have. For example, many people link their content to Wikipedia pages to save time describing a thing or idea. The result is that Wikipedia pages rank high in authority about the topic, which is why you often see them near the top of search engine results.
Organically increasing backlink authority can take a lot of work. It often involves a persistent effort to network with other businesses and find mutually beneficial support for each other. In other words, you have to ask a lot of people who have content that relates to yours to reference you as an authority on the topic or product.
There are tools to help you build lists of relevant contacts, which also involve scraping the web. Using a web scraper, you are able to hone in on businesses on platforms like LinkedIn, search for broken links that you can satisfy with your content, and keep an eye out for opportunities to support someone’s business with a guest post or reference to an existing body of knowledge.
Technical Optimization
Technical optimization is the process of making changes to a technical system in order to improve its performance. This can include making changes to the hardware, software, or configuration of the system.
For websites, this can mean eliminating broken links to improve crawlability, managing traffic, and giving a sort of feng shui to the layout. All this allows search engines to communicate better with your website and hopefully connect you to potential customers.
You can use web crawlers and web scraping tools to complete these tasks much more efficiently. In the case of managing traffic, you can test the integrity of your website by sending thousands of requests with a web scraper to see what load it can handle. This way you can diagnose any weak spots that may need technical upgrades.
In fact, you can also offer this as a service. Websites will pay you to challenge their system with what resembles a DDOS attack. It’s common for retail websites who experience peaks in traffic around limited releases like sneakers and graphics cards.
Great Content
Check out the number of websites there are in real-time. I’d say the growth rate is around three per second. As we stroll into 2022, we’re nearing 2 billion websites on the internet.
That’s a lot of content.
Decades ago, you could get by with less-than-great content. Heck, as long as there’s a keyword or two, a drunk-text would do.
But these days you need GREAT content. (Admittedly, there are some great drunk texts)
For years, internet marketing has had growing pains. One of those pains is content mills that stuff keywords into some shamble of a paragraph with no consideration to who is reading. They only try to appeal to search engine preferences.
No one likes to read stuff written to be read by an algorithm.
Luckily, search engines evolved and the internet is growing out of offending everyone’s intelligence.
Even the Google bots have had enough.
Content needs to be real so it can relate.
It should deliver value without watering it down.
Brutally honest and polished for clarity.
And it doesn’t hurt to have a sense of humor.
Actually, it’s a must-have.
Search Engine Proxies for SEO scraping
Proxies help make the SEO efforts in this article more effective and efficient. ‘SEO proxies’ and ‘SERP proxies’ are two terms to describe proxies you use for SEO and SERP purposes. These terms are just keyword optimized and simply refer to proxies.
Just in case you were wondering.
However, the best proxies for web scraping and web crawling are rotating residential proxies. This is because they are easier and safer to use. If used correctly, you should never get banned from using a web scraping tool that’s paired with residential proxies.
It’s very common for data center proxies to get banned just because they do not have a residential IP address. Residential proxies on the other hand – well, the name speaks for itself. They also have the ability to rotate IPs whenever a new request is sent so that your web scraping doesn’t look like a bot.
Combining web scrapers with residential proxies also opens up the whole globe. You can access websites or search engine data that may be restricted in one area and not in another.
Looking to up your marketing game with web scraping?
