There is an ongoing revolution in modern business now, and as time progresses things such as digitization, and digital transformation, have taken on extra importance. During the pandemic, retailers began to understand the significance of vertical integration, and also the ability to pivot when a sudden change happens.
Major changes over the last few decades include the integration of the net into working practices. Where the internet was once a haven for pointless homemade Geocities websites, it is now a vital business tool, and ecommerce is a $6.3 trillion market.
AI, blockchain technology, cloud services, and big data, are all parts of the modern business revolution. And proxies are just one more tool that companies can use to improve their processes.
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Why do businesses use proxies?
A proxy is a way to filter your data through a middleman so your activity can remain undetected. While the data you send and receive isn’t encrypted, it is almost impossible to trace it back to your real location.
Rotating residential proxies from proxyempire.io will replace your actual IP address with others from a pool of over 5 million. This will then give you a level of anonymity when going online, and increase your business’s cyber security.
There are plenty of reasons for proxies in business today including data collection, market research, and generating leads. And you can look into these and other uses of proxies in more detail below.
How are proxies revolutionizing business?
The main function of a proxy is to hide the user’s IP address. This identifier is easy to discover, and websites will take a recording of it when you visit. In some cases, your IP address might be restricted which means you won’t be able to see certain content or web pages. When this happens, a proxy can bypass the restriction.
However, proxies are helping businesses big and small to revolutionize certain processes, and the uses of a proxy can be quite varied. Here are just some of the ways that modern businesses are using proxies now.
Providing content for websites
One type of scraping process involves capturing content from websites. This can help with pricing comparisons and cataloging your rivals’ product lines, and to extract image and text content for your website.
There are many tips you can use to boost your website, and providing relevant quality content is one of them. Scraping content using a proxy is a fast way to generate web pages. Nevertheless, Google and other search engines frown on plagiarism, and shortcuts like this usually result in rankings on SERPs plummeting.
Improved SEO for business websites
SEO proxies are used to gather large quantities of data from relevant websites, which generally means your competitors. This can help with collecting search engine data and keyword analysis.
Proxies allow scrapers to gather SEO-relevant data far quicker than any manual option can. And by collecting information such as reviews, comments, and social media activity, you can start to build an SEO strategy to outperform your rivals’ websites.
Anonymity while online
As previously mentioned, proxies allow businesses to remain anonymous when they are online, and this makes it harder for hackers to track your activity back to you.
This anonymity means that you can also hold multiple accounts, on social networks for instance, but under different IP addresses.
Multiple social media accounts
Many businesses have more than one brand under their corporate umbrella. For instance, Coca-Cola owns Dr. Pepper, Schweppes, and Powerade. This can mean that numerous different social media accounts need to be maintained.
Using rotating residential proxies means that certain restrictions on social media can be bypassed. Social media networks such as Facebook limit the number of accounts that can be held, so proxies are a way to bypass this and create many profiles at once.
Data collection with proxies
Collecting data has been given a bad name due to some high-profile cases involving the selling of personal information without users’ permission. But, as one US appeals court ruling declared, data scraping is legal as long as the information is publicly available.
This means that researchers and analysts can gather data without fear of prosecution, and companies can use proxies to scrape contact details and generate more leads.
Bypassing restrictions with proxies
It is quite common for a home computer user to log in to a VPN to bypass restrictions to access Netflix or gaming servers overseas. But for businesses, geo-restrictions can hinder such tasks as ad verification and market research.
Proxies can be set to servers and devices in any number of countries and cities depending on how comprehensive the proxy service is. This means that content that is restricted to Australia for instance, can be viewed by using an Australian proxy network. This allows companies to access any website, and carry out tasks such as those below.
Market research
If you cannot access websites in a country where you would like to gather data you can use a proxy to bypass the restrictions. One good example here is China which maintains strict control over internet access in the country.
China’s great firewall limits the ability of residents and overseas computer users to access information online. Researchers and journalists regularly need to find dependable news and data from within this country, and a proxy could help them do so.
For businesses, being able to scrape data from markets such as China can give valuable insights into the possibilities of expansion there, and what the competition is like.
Ad verification
The internet allows companies to go global with ease, and ecommerce has opened up valuable markets and consumer bases to businesses everywhere. Yet, reaching these people requires advertising and marketing.
One problem with advertising in different regions is that you can’t always view your actual ads online and verify they are on appropriate sites and that the performance data you are receiving is accurate. Proxies allow businesses to check their ads and verify them by switching geographical locations.
Check reviews of your products
Likewise, you might want to check feedback and reviews on websites in different regions, and proxies can let you do this also.
Increased security
The use of reverse proxy servers can help to protect your technology and data by identifying threats such as DDoS attacks, and scrapers. While you can use rotating proxies to scrape data, you can also use a reverse proxy server to help prevent the same from happening to you.
Reverse proxies also help to avoid overloading, speed up website download times, and encrypt data.
Summary
Forward proxies such as rotating residential choices are extremely helpful in business for speeding up certain processes such as data collection. Gathering wholesale data from websites would be near impossible without the use of proxies, and scrapers would be identified and blocked very swiftly without the use of residential IP addresses.
Security is always a concern for ecommerce and online businesses, and reverse proxies can provide valuable encryption and protection from attackers. In many cases, they can also protect your data from being scraped by your rivals.
And as business becomes ever more global, being able to access geo-restricted data is a must. Proxies once again can help businesses out here.
