5 Use Cases for Residential Proxies

By Efrat Vulfsons

Proxies mask your real IP address with that of a proxy server’s IP address. However, proxies are of different types based on the location of proxy servers’ IPs. Residential proxies hide your real IP address with an IP address that comes from an original physical location rather than a data center. The best part about residential proxies is that they are challenging to identify as the IPs they provide belong to a physical location.

From bypassing geo-restrictions and IP blocking to SEO monitoring, there are various uses of residential proxies. In this article, we will be sharing the five most essential benefits of residential proxies. So, let’s get started.

Below Are Five Use Cases for Residential Proxies

• SEO Monitoring: Many people use residential proxies for SEO monitoring and optimization. SEO monitoring is used to make your site rank in the search engine. This way, the visibility of your website increases, and more traffic is drawn to your page. However, the question is how residential proxies can help you with SEO monitoring.

For this, you need to understand that digital monitoring and web scraping go hand in hand. Residential proxies are the best for web scraping as they offer robust security. You can use them to scrape large amounts of data easily without getting caught. The data gathered can then be analyzed for gaining insights, learning about your competitor’s business strategies, price monitoring, popular keywords, and various other things that will, in turn, help in SEO monitoring.

• Data Crawling: Another critical use of residential proxies is data crawling. With residential proxies, you can retrieve plenty of relevant data within minutes. Extracting relevant data from thousands of web pages isn’t easy when done manually. If done manually, it will take days or even weeks. Therefore, almost all companies use bots to crawl data. However, bots are easy to detect because of the security that websites have.

To crawl data using bots, you need residential proxies. Residential proxies make it difficult for websites to detect data crawlers by masking your IP address. Moreover, since the IPs used by residential proxies belong to a physical location, you get maximum security.

• Alternative Data Collection: Alternative data is becoming immensely popular among e-commerce companies. It is used by online businesses to gather actionable insights, consumer sentiments, track customer behavior, know their target audience, and boost sales. However, collecting alternative data is a tedious task. It requires gathering data from different e-commerce platforms, and companies use bots for that.

It is important to use residential proxies with your bots to collect data without any restrictions. Residential proxies help in gathering data from multiple sites without the issues of geo-restriction and IP blocking. It also increases the speed at which the data is collected.

• Ad Verification: Another vital function of residential proxies is ad verification. First, residential proxies help to test your ad in multiple locations by letting you bypass geo-restriction and IP blocking. Second, residential proxies help in detecting fraud ads without disclosing your true identity. They mask your real IP address and let you find irrelevant ads by remaining anonymous. In this way, you can stop your competitor from defaming your brand.
• Social Media Monitoring: Many people widely use different social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for e-commerce. Residential proxies come in handy when you try to handle multiple social media accounts, reach out to different audiences, promote your business in different locations, run social media campaigns, gain insights, run multiple accounts, and so on. This is a pretty standard practice for Social Marketing Media Agencies, which means you should probably do it too.

Conclusion

Residential proxies have many essential uses. Because of the robust security, many online businesses and social media marketers have started using residential proxies. Unlike other proxies, residential proxies mask your IP address with an IP address from a physical location. As a result, you get more security compared to data center proxies. From maintaining your online privacy to let you browse the web without any restrictions, residential proxies are extremely useful. Nowadays, residential proxies are widely used for SEO monitoring, social media monitoring, data crawling, ad verification, and alternative data collection.

With many businesses turning to online platforms, SEO optimization and social media monitoring are becoming immensely important. Companies and brands frequently require extracting large amounts of data from different websites. They also need to reach out to target audiences from other locations, run social media campaigns, manage multiple accounts, etc. Residential proxies come in handy in all these cases. Moreover, extracting relevant information isn’t that easy. However, data crawling is not a hassle with residential proxies. They help brands gather significant data by skimming through the vast amount of data available online. Hence, residential proxies are extremely important, and their demand is increasing day by day.