The perennial challenge for businesses today is how to gain a stable competitive advantage in the online market. Both new and old organizations are using similar online marketing strategies to increase reach, traffic, and relevance.
Most efforts are directed towards search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Organizations invest in SEO and analytics tools. But, efforts mean nothing when they don’t show results. It’s important to pair each arduous SEO effort with proper monitoring.
What Is SEO Monitoring?
Despite the fast development of different SEO strategies, Google considers, more or less, the same factors for ranking over the years. First on the list is high-quality content, on-page SEO, and seamless technical SEO.
Careful and consistent SEO monitoring works on both on-page and off-page (technical) SEO.
From the name itself, it is a process of closely monitoring SEO data and strategies. It looks into how your website is ranking in terms of search engine visibility and overall brand reception.
Comprehensive SEO monitoring looks into the following:
- Organic Traffic
- Keyword Rankings
- Page Loading Speed
- Conversion Rates
- Bounce Rates
- Backlinks
The elements listed above mostly relate to technical SEO. On-page SEO, on the other hand, pertains to meta-tags, meta-descriptions, and quality content. Content formatting also weighs in on its significance.
Almost all SEO audit tools today provide the elements and classify them as basic SEO information. Thus, these are easily accessible if you have access to the right tools. But because of the dense competition to secure a page-one on search engine results page (SERP) ranking, having access to the right tools might not help you produce your desired results.
What you can do is leverage the use of data proxies.
Utilize Free Proxy for SEO Monitoring
Back then, proxy centers were often associated with illegal activities only. It comes to mind when hackers and cyberattacks are mentioned. Although it still holds some truth, it is proving to be an essential tool for business people at this age of densely-competitive online market.
Free proxy servers can actually improve your SEO monitoring methods. The way data proxy works is that it acts as a middle ground between the user and a website. Once the user uses a datacenter proxy, his IP address is no longer visible to the target website. As such, the user can access and browse the website anonymously.
Anyone can enjoy these benefits as reputable proxy servers are easily accessible on free proxy servers lists.
How does this help with SEO monitoring? Here’s how.
See What Competition Is Up To
To improve your SEO practices, one of the best ways to do this is to check what’s working. The ideal benchmarks are, of course, your high-ranking competitors. Aside from that, it always pays to know who you are up against.
Consistent visits to your competition’s website may put you at risk when you are marked as a spam user. To counteract that, proxies offer the anonymity that you need during this type of research.
It’s also the best way to experience your competitors’ sites as objectively as possible. Check their site’s functionalities, loading speed, and browse through their blogs and other content. Data collected from this are essential for your next strategy planning, especially with the competitor analysis.
Moreover, you also need the protection provided by proxy servers when you decide to do some web scraping of data from a particular website. You’ll never know which of your competitors have stricter protective methods in place.
Effective Keyword Research
Working hard smartly is the way to go. Doing comprehensive keyword research is not enough when you don’t include searching from competitor sites. Proxy servers help you web scrape the best sets of keywords from your competitors’ high-ranking blog posts.
Rather than publishing your content blindly, having an idea of which keywords to add and estimated frequency will affect a blog’s SERP ranking.
An added benefit of having a blanket of anonymity during keyword research is that you can search for keywords organically. Not having one means that your existing algorithm filters your searches, so the results often come up skewed to your preferences.
Keyword research while connecting to a proxy data center will provide a more general set of keywords that are most likely searched by the public.
Evaluate Your SEO Efforts
One way to effectively evaluate your SEO efforts is to see and experience them from an outsider’s perspective. Connecting to a proxy server will be the most effective tool for that.
Go through your websites as a third-party consumer. Check the site speed, see if the links don’t end up in 404 or 405 errors, and experience what it’s like to be a consumer checking out your site.
Not only does this provide an objective view of the experience, but you also get to come up with ideas on what to improve. It’s definitely a better and much more time-efficient strategy than just analyzing data from consumers. Sometimes, it really is better to see it for yourself.
Jump Through Geographical Restrictions
Lastly, one of the best benefits of using a proxy server for SEO monitoring is the easy access to restricted zones.
As the “middle man” of the transaction, proxy servers mask your IP address with another address from another country. Say, your current location bans access to certain European country sites. Connecting with a free proxy server lets you access all those restricted sites by connecting with a data center that has easy access.
As such, data web scraping from competitor sites from those areas are also made accessible. It’s also safer. Your activity won’t be marked as suspicious and be banned by the website. Every log in carries a different IP address, so shadow bans and spammed accounts are almost impossible.
Improve Your SEO Monitoring
All your efforts, resources, and time will be rendered useless if not monitored and scaled accordingly. No one wants wasted effort, time, and, most especially, wasted money. Costly SEO strategies are easily monitored and strengthened by utilizing free strategies, such as free proxy servers.
But, of course, you should always have other monitoring strategies. Relying on a single monitoring method won’t also be as efficient as having two or more.