Countless modern digital businesses use proxies daily for many different purposes. Proxies are among the most popular tech tools among businesses of all sizes and residential internet users alike. Ordinary internet users rely on proxies to access streaming services like Netflix and unblock restricted content in their area.
However, you can use proxies for much more than bypassing restrictions. Proxies offer a wide range of different benefits and advantages for businesses, ranging from changing IP and hiding location to scraping competitors’ websites without being detected or blocked.
In the case of residential proxies, they are perfect for businesses that want to keep their online activities to themselves. Since they are more anonymous than any other type of proxy, they are perfect for web scraping target websites without getting your scraping bots blacklisted.
Let’s define what residential proxies are, how they differ from other proxies and top business use cases.
What are residential proxies?
Out of many different types of proxy, two are most popular in the digital business realm – residential and datacenter proxies. Both can significantly improve the user’s anonymity online by hiding their IP.
However, their features make them different. Residential proxies make the user anonymous by replacing their IP with another one.
Since a residential proxy is so anonymous, it is harder to detect and more legitimate. Businesses mostly rely on residential proxies to increase anonymity and improve their efforts. They can access geo-blocked websites, target geo-restricted content, monitor and track SERPs, improve SEO, scrape competitors’ sites, compare prices, and aggregate data.
What makes them different?
Residential proxies are provided by an ISP. This type of proxy provides a dedicated IP address to the residential or commercial user to mimic a real internet user with a real, physical IP address and location.
This source of IP is what essentially differs residential proxies from other proxies. Even though they are more expensive when compared to other proxies, residential proxies offer a huge pool of IP addresses that are perfect for accessing geo-restricted content in any location worldwide.
Some of the biggest advantages of using this type of proxies include:
- More secure internet connection;
- Preventing tracking of your IP address by hackers and tracking companies;
- Reducing the risk of getting blocked or detected while web scraping;
- No third-party influence on your browsing activities;
- Bypassing geo-restrictions;
- Protecting your personal and sensitive data, servers, and information;
- Masking your IP address and hiding your location.
Although they do provide some benefits, residential proxies can be slow at times and are very expensive.
5 real business uses for residential proxies
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Scraping prices
Getting ahead of your competitors in the overwhelmingly competitive digital business environment isn’t only difficult and quite challenging. The digital business landscape is constantly changing, and the biggest challenge is coping with those changes.
Proxies make it easier for businesses to engage in such an environment, compare prices and conduct all sorts of competitive analyses in real-time to find an advantage over their competitors. Scraping prices allows a business to adapt its pricing strategies and maintain a leading position in the market.
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Competitive intelligence
Most businesses use a residential proxy for gathering competitive intelligence from competitors’ websites. This type of proxy makes your scraping requests look like being sent by a real person. Many popular online services block any IP that doesn’t look or feel genuine.
They also block IP requests from particular providers. If you need to perform competitive analysis by targeting multiple sites and sending numerous requests, residential proxies will use different IPs to distribute your requests from different locations, thus preventing blocking.
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Review monitoring
Data gathering, market analysis, and review monitoring are the benchmarks of a successful business organization. They are also vital to your efforts to gain a competitive edge. Residential proxies are perfect for finding out what your customers and competitors are saying about your brand.
You can gather accurate, real-time data on your industry, market, consumers, and competition and address the exact needs of your target audience. It’s one of the best ways for e-commerce businesses to keep an eye on their consumers and influence their purchasing decisions.
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Performance monitoring
One of the best things about residential proxies is that they can be customized and tuned to match your exact needs.
If you need to improve your ranking on search engines and monitor the performance of your SEO, content, social media, and other marketing campaigns, proxies allow you to create and manage multiple accounts across all channels of communication your consumers use.
You can rank higher on search engine results, optimize your digital presence, and enhance your marketing efforts.
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Protecting brand image
In the digital business landscape, building and protecting your brand image has never been more important.
Since it takes a lot of effort, time, and money to create a brand, protecting your company’s intellectual property from malware, ransomware, phishing, and counterfeit should be your number one priority.
A residential proxy ensures the highest levels of anonymity, privacy, and security, but more importantly, it allows you to track how and where your intellectual property is being used.
Conclusion
A residential proxy can be a very useful tool for businesses of all sizes. Whether they need to increase their anonymity and security online, scrape target websites for data, monitor prices and markets, or collect data without being detected, proxies are the best tools for such actions.
Also Read: 8 Ways Professional Proxy Services Are Beneficial for Your Business
Enterprises often use proxies to access different web resources, gather data, monitor their competitors, research markets, etc. If your goal is to scrape data anonymously, residential proxies are your best option.
