Proxies for SERP and SEO monitoring
There is no single ranking for a keyword. There is a ranking in a place, and you have to look from that place to see it.
The problem
Search results are localised, and for many queries they differ substantially between countries and between cities within a country.
Checked from your office, a ranking report describes your office. For a client in another market, that is not the data they are paying for.
Local-intent queries are the extreme case: results can change street by street, so the granularity of your targeting sets the ceiling on the accuracy of your report.
What we would configure
- Proxy type
- Residential — search engines classify hosting ranges aggressively
- Rotation
- Per request, so each query is independent
- Targeting
- Country for national terms; city for local-intent terms
- Cadence
- Daily at most for most terms; weekly is enough for stable ones
Rank tracking is a measurement task, so consistency matters more than raw volume. The same location, the same cadence, and one query per address gives you numbers you can compare over time.
A real connection
Built from the same parameter grammar the network accepts — copy it and change the country.
user-USERNAME-type-residential-country-us-city-chicago-rotation--1Keep location and cadence constant between runs. A ranking series is only comparable if nothing but the date changed.
What goes wrong
- Tracking from a single location and reporting it as a national ranking
- Reusing one address across many queries, which lets personalisation build up and skew results
- Comparing this week to last week when the targeting changed in between
- Requesting city targeting on queries whose results do not vary below national level — narrower coverage, no extra signal
Questions
- Why do my rankings differ from what I see in my browser?
- Your browser carries history, a logged-in account and a location. A clean proxied request carries none of that, which is closer to a first-time searcher in that market — and further from your personalised view.
- Datacenter for rank tracking?
- Search engines classify hosting ranges aggressively, so datacenter tends to get challenged or served degraded results. Residential is the practical default for this workload.
- One IP for all queries?
- No. Repeated queries from one address let personalisation accumulate, which skews later results. Rotate per query so each observation is independent.