Most modern companies use the web for a plethora of reasons, whether it be for spreading brand awareness and conducting competitive analysis or gathering valuable business intelligence and making important online purchases. Regardless of what your company is using the internet for, security and productivity factors like anonymity, reliability, and the ability to scale up are always important to consider.
In the simplest terms, proxies let you access websites and online services through different IP addresses, thereby concealing your actual IP address, and allowing you to bypass geographical and usage-based restrictions. While that may seem like something that your business wouldn’t need to do, when you start to reach higher levels of automation and expansion, you’ll probably need to use proxies for at least one of the following 10 reasons:
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SEO Monitoring
Businesses often use proxies to run SEO monitoring and content distribution tools like Market Samurai, SEO Powersuite, and Scrapebox. Misusing such tools can lead to account bans, search engine de-indexing, and other issues – proxies serve as a buffer between such potential consequences.
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Social Media
Entrepreneurs often use dedicated proxies for each social networking account to prevent accounts from being linked or banned. For example, someone who runs multiple businesses wouldn’t want all of their businesses to suffer because one of their social media accounts encountered problems.
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Sneakers
Many people are using proxy servers to access special sneaker deals on sites like Footlocker, where certain sneaker releases are initially made available to specific markets. Of course, the point of this business model is to resell the newly released sneakers in other markets where they can’t yet be easily purchased.
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Ad Verification
Businesses also use proxies to see what their own ads will look like from different geographical regions. For example, you can connect to proxy servers in New York City to verify that geo-targeted ads are being properly displayed to your NYC market.
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Cybersecurity
Sharing your real IP address, browser user agent, and other identifying computer details with the world can be risky when you’re running a business. Proxies can be used to create a shield of anonymity that can help protect you from cyber-attacks like hacking and data breaches.
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Pricing Intelligence
Many e-commerce businesses scrape and analyze pricing intelligence and other insightful data from major platforms like Amazon using tools like Scrapy ,WebHarvey, and OutWitHub.
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Brand Protection
The anonymity and separation that proxies provide help you keep personal and promotional online activities segmented from your brand. For example, you can conduct your social marketing campaigns through proxies to prevent potential problems like being flagged by a competitor. If a marketing proxy gets flagged, your brand’s dedicated proxy won’t be linked to it.
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Comment Posting Verification
Many sites will “ghost” a comment if an algorithm presumes a Terms of Service (ToS) violation, or if the comment is flagged. When this happens, the comment or ad will still be visible when viewed from the poster’s IP address. However, when you visit from another IP address, the comment won’t show. Thus, connecting through a proxy service allows you to verify that your comments are actually visible to the rest of the world.
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Travel Fares
Many travel booking platforms like Travelocity , Expedia ,and KAYAK will display geo-targeted travel fare deals depending on your IP address. Similar to the sneaker method, you can visit these sites using proxies to find geo-targeted booking deals.
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Craigslist
Finally, if you plan on using classified ads on sites like Craigslist as part of your marketing or hiring strategies, proxies will let you safely automate and scale up using posting software.
Almost All Advanced Businesses Utilize Proxies
In closing, it’s worth noting that almost all large companies have benefited from the use of proxies. Marketing agencies rely on proxies to keep their clients’ accounts and campaigns from being linked, and all large companies have outsourced at least some of their marketing. Thus, any progressive business owner should learn more about employing proxies using some of the methods mentioned above.