SEO is incredibly important for business owners who want to make an impact online. In order to get your content seen by more people, you have to rank high in the search results. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) and research play an important role. While conducting this research, there are many automated tools, like the Google Search API, that help with the process. Keep reading to discover how tools like these can benefit your SEO practice and the important role that proxies play in the process.
The Use of Manual SEO Tools
There are many SEO services that you can look at to help improve your rankings. However, many SEO services are expensive to use, and not within budget for smaller businesses that don’t have extensive budgets.
This doesn’t mean you just have to wish for the best when it comes to your SEO. Many affordable manual SEO tools can be used to conduct valuable research and make the necessary improvements to your SEO to get your content ranking high in search engines.
However, while these tools are a great cost-saving option, there are some challenges when using them. For one, search engines are notorious for not allowing bots or automation tools. As such, if you were to just start using one of these manual SEO tools, you’ll likely run into CAPTCHA, anti-bot technology, and even IP bans that will block the use of these tools.
Luckily, there’s a way to overcome this obstacle so that you can conduct your research and collect the necessary data to improve your rankings. That is using a proxy alongside your SEO tools.
How Can SEO Proxies Assist?
Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which proxies can assist your SEO practices.
Collecting SEO Data
Web scraping is the industry standard for automated data collection. However, there are specialized scraping tools available, such as the Google Search API that can help you to collect relevant SEO data. These tools can help you track your search engine ranking results, see Google featured snippets, collect image URLs, and more. These tools can also help you see organic and paid search results to give you an idea of what your competitors are doing, and how your campaigns are doing.
Conducting Site Audits
Website audits are important as they show you how your website is performing in comparison to competitors. This is crucial as it’s a great way to identify areas that need to be improved. However, in order to conduct a site audit, you’ll need to extract a lot of data from your own website as well as your competitors. These bulk scraping activities will get a ban if you don’t use a proxy alongside your scraping tool.
Research Competitors
Researching your competitors is an important way to improve your SEO. By scraping their content, you can find out what topics they’re covering and how, what their content strategy is, whether they’re ranking higher than you in search results, and more. However, just using a scraping tool on its own will notify your competitor of what you’re doing and which data you’re collecting. In order to avoid this, you need to pair your scraping tool with a reliable proxy to avoid detection.
Contributing to Backlinks
Posting your content in various communities and social media platforms is a great way to get backlinks which boosts your SEO. However, taking the time to share your content manually can take a long time. Many automation tools can automate this process of sharing your content on these platforms. However, they need to run alongside a proxy to avoid getting banned.
Track Ranking
In order to see if any of the improvements you made had an effect, you need to monitor your rankings carefully. This should be done at a set interval, such as once a week or month, and should be done for every location you target and every keyword within that location. Pairing a proxy with your scraping tool, or using a Google Search API that already includes one, will keep your tools from getting blocked while collecting your ranking data.
Which Proxies Should You Consider?
Generally speaking, residential proxies are your best bet when it comes to web scraping and the use of automation tools. This is because they are linked to real IPs, meaning search engines and websites don’t pick them up as being linked to bots or automation tools.
In recent years, there have been many advancements in the development of proxies. Now you can get specialized residential rotating proxies that automatically change the IP with each new request. This effectively removes the need for in-depth proxy management. There are even tools like the Google Search API, which combines a scraper, parser, and proxy all in one convenient tool.
Final Thoughts
Using automation tools to benefit your SEO is a great idea as it’s efficient and saves you money. However, using a proxy alongside these tools is crucial to ensure they aren’t blocked. Using these proxies will lead to better data collection as you’re not being blocked, and therefore, their importance in the process shouldn’t be underestimated.
