SEO Proxies: Providers, Best Practice & Use Cases in 2024

Companies are looking for ways to improve their SEO (search engine optimization) to secure top Google positions for certain queries. Collecting data related to SEO is crucial to measure performance and create an effective strategy. However, the process of collecting large amount of data from web sources is tedious and time-consuming. You can benefit from no-code web scraping tools to extract data from social media platform, websites and search engines.

While conducting data collection for SEO tasks, the scraper might encounter challenges like IP bans, anti-scraping measures like CAPTCHAs, and dynamic content. SEO proxies enable businesses to complete SEO tasks cost-effectively and timely.

In this article, we will discuss what an SEO proxy is, how proxies accelerate SEO initiatives, and offer you best practices. We will also review the best SEO proxies, highlighting their capabilities and pricing plans.

The best SEO proxy services of 2024

We chose the vendors based on their market presence and customer satisfaction metrics since they are correlated with a company success in the market. While deciding SEO proxy providers, we used these verifiable criteria:

• 40+ employees on LinkedIn
• 5+ reviews on review sites such as G2, Trustradius, and Capterra.

1. Bright Data

Bright Data offers proxies from 195 countries for a variety of SEO activities, including scraping or monitoring SEO-related data. Their SEO proxy network is comprised of residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP proxies. You can utilize residential proxies to access geo-restricted content and extract public data for SEO purposes. The proxy service provider offers more than 72 million residential IPs from real devices to support large-scale SEO initiatives and reduce the possibility of being blocked by the website you are interacting with.

Features:

• Real-time network performance dashboard: Provides up-to-the-minute information about the overall network performance and proxy usage.
• Dedicated account managers: Provides customized solutions and quick problem resolution.
• City, ASN and zip code level targeting: You can select IP addresses at the state, city and zip level. It might be useful for local SEO, local content testing.
• Dedicated IPs: Assigns IP addresses exclusively to a single user. Dedicated SEO proxies provides better performance and speed compared to shared proxies.
• Extended session control: Allows users to keep the same IP over an extended period of time, you can specify the duration of time.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $6.3/GB/monthly
• Free trial: 7-day trial

2. Smartproxy

Smartproxy provides 55 million anonymous residential IPs with 195+ locations for different SEO practices. The SEO proxy service allows users to scrape data from websites and social media platforms, and access localized content.

Features:

• Username: password & Whitelisted IPs: The proxy provider offers both of these methods for authentication. Depending on your specific specific use case, you can choice between them. In username:password method, the provider requires a specific username and password to provide access to the pool. Whitelisted IPs are those that have been approved by the proxy provider. The provider whitelists each device’s IP address and denies IPs not on the list.
• HTTP(s) + SOCKS5 protocols: Supports HTTP(s) and SOCKS5 protocols. You can route your traffic using proxies.
• IP rotation: Allows users to change their IPs for each request or maintain the same IP for up to 30 min.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $9/GB/monthly
• Free trial: Introduce a paid trial offer for residential users, where they can select any plan and test all the features within a 3-day period with a 100MB limit, all for just $1.

3. Oxylabs

Oxylabs provides a variety of proxy servers, including residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile proxies to help users access localized content, and bypass anti-bot measures.

Features:

• Shared & dedicated proxy servers: Offers 2M+ dedicated datacenter proxies and 29K+ datacenter proxy pool.
• HTTP and HTTPS protocols: Supports both HTTP and HTTPS protocols.
• Session control: Offers a session duration of up to 30 minutes. You can maintain the same IP address for for up to 30 minutes from the time of initiation.
• Automatic proxy rotation: Rotates IPs for each connection request or after a particular period of time. It selects another IP address from the proxy pool randomly or based on some criteria.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $15/GB (residential), $0.65/GB (datacenter)
• Free trial: 7-day

4. NetNut

NetNut offers 52M+ residential SEO proxies, providing users with legitimate IP addresses provided by Internet Service Providers. The proxy service providers offers both rotating and static residential IPs. Depending on your specific SEO project, you can utilize dynamic or static IPs. For example, if your SEO activity involves tasks like social media management, you might benefit from static residential proxies. If you want to collect data from one of your competitors’ websites, you could use rotating SEO proxies to rotate IPs regularly.

Features:

• Sticky IP sessions: You can use the same IP address for an extended period of time. If you are managing a social media account, you might need to maintain the same IP over a period of time to reduce the risk of getting banned.
• Dedicated private pools: Provides private IP addresses. Dedicated proxies, also known as private proxies, are IP addresses that are used by a single user or device simultaneously.
• Auto IP rotation: Changes IPs automatically after a certain period of time or after every request.
• Hybrid Network: Consists of ISP + Residential IPs. The proxy provider combines these two proxy types to improve the performance and reliability.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $15/GB
• Free trial: 7-day trial

5. IPRoyal

IPRoyal’s SEO proxies helps search engine crawlers in collecting SERP data by circumventing geo-restrictions and IP bans. They offer various proxy servers, including residential, datacenter, and ISP proxies. You can choose the proxy solution based on your SEO project’s specific requirements. For instance, you can utilize datacenter proxies, if the primary concern for your SEO activities is speed.

Features:

• Country, state, and city-level targeting: You can select an IP address associated with a particular city or state.
• Rotating and sticky sessions: Offers rotating and sticky IPs. Depending on your specific needs, you can maintain the same IP for a period of time, or change IP addresses at random intervals.
• Flexible rotation options: The providers offers customized rotation options. You can specify the frequency of rotation, such as time-based frequency or request-based frequency based on your needs of a SEO project.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $7/GB/monthly
• Free trial: N/A

6. Infatica

Infatica offers residential and datacenter proxies for SEO monitoring and scraping up-to-date SERP data without being detected and blocked.

Features:

• IP & Login:Pass authentication: IP and Login/Pass authentication are two common techniques of security measures used by proxy services. In IP authentication, the proxy provider whitelists IP addresses provided by users. When the user makes a request from one of theses whitelisted IPs, the provider allow the connection. Login/Pass method includes using a username and password to access to the proxy pool.
• Extend sessions for up to 30 minutes: Allows users to keep the same IP address for up to 30 minutes.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $97/GB/monthly
• Free trial: 3-day money-back option

What is an SEO proxy?

An SEO proxy functions as an intermediary between user device and the website the user interacting with. It enhances ​various SEO (search engine optimization) purposes, such as rank tracking, SERP tracking, scraping SEO data, and keyword research.

Do you need proxies to perform SEO tasks?

Proxies are mainly used to automate SEO tasks. A massive amount of data is required to perform SEO tasks such as scraping content from competitors’ websites, rank tracking, and checking websites to identify technical issues and optimize websites. Manual data collection is time-consuming and inefficient. SEO proxies enable individuals or organizations to extract vast data quickly and automatically without being blocked or blacklisted. The main concern is choosing the right proxy type for your SEO tasks. 

To learn more about proxy types, read our article on different types of proxy server and their benefits.

How Can Proxies Be Used for SEO?

1. Position monitoring

To understand your visibility and share of voice among competitors, you must closely track and measure your keyword positions. You can check your target keywords monthly or daily, depending on your needs and SEO efforts. It allows you to track any changes in your target keywords’ positions and identify your competitors in the exact keywords.

How proxies can be used for position monitoring: A proxy server allows individuals or businesses to get the most accurate data available in a specific region.

Challenge: It takes time to crawl a large number of web pages. If speed is essential for your SEO tasks, not all proxy servers will suffice. If your web scraping bot crawls the same website with the same IP address, the web server is more likely to detect and blacklist the web scraping bot. In this case, you must change your actual IP address for each crawl request in order to avoid being blocked by the website.

Tip for solution:  Residential and ISP proxies, assign real IP addresses to users to send web scraping requests.  That’s why, getting blocked by websites with residential and ISP proxies compared to data center proxies is less likely than other proxy services. In addition to that, ISP proxies combine the functionality of both the speed of data center proxies and the high anonymity of residential proxies. In a nutshell, ISP proxies are an ideal solution for your SEO tasks requiring high anonymity and speed. 

For guidance in choosing the right residential proxy service, check out Top 10 Residential Proxy Providers of 2023.

2. SEO competitive analysis 

Adopting a data-driven approach to SEO is critical for understanding your customer’s needs and behaviors. Analyzing content performance in terms of backlinks, keyword rankings, titles, and meta descriptions is part of the data-driven approach to SEO. However, analyzing only the performance of your content is insufficient. For example, your content and target keyword positions may suffer due to your competitor’s content. In that case, you should examine your competitor’s backlinks and top-performing pages to determine what and how keywords they are using.

How proxies can be used for position monitoring: SEO proxies enable individuals or businesses to extract all kinds of data from their competitors’ web pages. It allows them to compare their content to that of competitors in terms of titles, meta descriptions, visual content, and keywords used.

Challenge: The main concern when collecting data from multiple web pages is the level of anonymity provided by the proxy. All proxy servers hide and mask the actual IP address of machines. However, the level of anonymity is different for each proxy server due to the source of the IP address.

Tip for solution: When crawling web pages, a residential proxy provides greater anonymity than other proxy servers such as datacenter, mobile, and ISP proxies. Residential proxies assign them real IP addresses to users when they go online.

3. SEO audit

SEO proxies scrape the contents of any website to identify technical issues that affect your website ranking on Google or other browsers, such as link quality, dead links (i.e., web pages that are no longer available), outside references, metadata, and so on. 

How proxies can be used for position monitoring: SEO proxies provide information on how companies’ websites rank on Google and how to improve their rankings. SEO proxies scrape contents weekly/ annually, depending on your needs or proxy type, to identify broken links, website speed, new backlinks, etc. 

Challenge: If your website is dynamic, JavaScript or CSS are used to make page elements, and Googlebot may struggle to understand and crawl it like an average user.

Tip for solution: You can help Google to understand and see your web pages in the same way that an average user does. You can utilize the URL Inspection tool to understand how Google renders your web pages. It provides information about video, images, linked AMP, etc. Here are some steps you can take to address this issue:

• Use the description tag to provide a summary of the page’s content.
• Use unique text for each of your pages’ title elements.

4. Keyword search

Ensure that your keywords include related terms, questions, and answers your target audience is interested in. You may have exhausted all relevant topics in your domain and are struggling to find new keywords to cover on your website. One source you can use is the vendor’s research pages. At this point, you need to crawl all research pages to get.

How proxies can be used for position monitoring: SEO proxies scrape all related keywords from your competitors’ web pages in a high volume, regardless of location.

Challenge: Most websites use anti-scraping techniques such as IP blocking and CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) to determine whether a user is a human or a robot and deny access to websites to them.

Tip for solution: To bypass CAPTCHA blockers, you can change your IP address from static to dynamic. It is helpful to avoid being detected as a crawler.

5. Content generation

The importance of content quality in SEO success cannot be overstated. To optimize content, you must first understand your share of voice and target audience preferences. Are they looking for artistic content (unique and original content created by content creators), or professionally presented informative content (requiring expertise and trustworthiness)?

How proxies can be used for position monitoring:  To keep an overall track of your website in each target location, you must first understand and analyze how your content performs in different countries. Proxies enable website owners to track their localized content in any country worldwide.

Challenge: The main goal of using proxies in keyword research is to understand better where you stand and what areas you need to improve. It will make competing against them easy. Simply because a keyword is essential to your competitor does not imply that it is also important to you. Just choosing and prioritizing keywords for this purpose for your website is a mistake.

Tip for solution: Do not just focus on the keywords that are important to your competitors. Check to see how their target audience differs or is similar to yours. Determine how these keywords will fit into the overall content of your website and adjust them accordingly.

More on proxy servers

• The Ultimate Guide to Rotating Proxies vs. Static Proxies
• Backconnect Proxies: overview, how-to, use cases, pros & cons
• The Ultimate Guide to Proxy vs. VPN: Which One Is Better?

If you want to learn more about SEO proxies you can reach us, and feel free to review our data-driven list of web scrapers: