According to a survey by the World Economic Forum, reputation accounts for 25% of a company’s market value.
These days, reputation is digital and extends far beyond what is said and printed about a brand in the “real world”. Instead, it’s the collective view of your organisation’s online presence.
Digital reputation is largely affected by things a company can control, such as its website, social media, or customer interactions. Unfortunately, it’s also affected by things a company has little to no control over, such as online reviews, forum discussions, or search engine visibility.
Fortunately, proxy solutions bridge the gap between what a company can and can’t do when managing its online digital reputation. The right solutions won’t give you complete control, but they’ll empower you to take the proper steps.
Anonymity and awareness
Monitoring how people talk about your brand lets you proactively manage your digital reputation. You could have someone manually search for and check web outlets for any brand mentions, but it’s more efficient to use or develop a web scraping tool to do it automatically.
However, many websites, especially social media platforms and review sites, use anti-scraping technologies to detect and block automated bots that collect data at scale. These technologies often flag IPs that make frequent requests within a short timeframe.
Proxy solutions enable you to bypass this barrier. When a company uses a proxy server, its requests to access websites are routed through the proxy so that the website logs the proxy’s IP address, not the company’s.
This camouflage means the company's main IP is unaffected even if website anti-scraping technologies are triggered. Self-healing proxy solutions are even better since they rotate IP addresses. If one is banned, any web-scraping tool can re-route to another and continue data collection uninterrupted.
This same principle can be used to monitor competitors, too. Knowing where your competitors stand regarding their digital reputation, such as through social media engagement or brand mentions, allows you to set benchmarks for your company.
Any digital reputation strategy must have its foundation in accurate and up-to-date data. This, itself, is dependent on the right technology, including the right proxy solutions.
Geospecificity
In the UK alone, more than 250,000 businesses operate internationally. For them and companies looking to expand international operations, it’s no longer enough to monitor how your brand is perceived locally. Instead, they have to be specific.
Unfortunately, many internet functions are geo-restricted. For example, many US websites are inaccessible from Europe due to non-compliance with GDPR. Likewise, search engine results are wholly specific to the location of the IP address from which the search was made.
Proxies enable businesses to bypass geo-restrictions and see search results, social media platforms, and review sites as if they were located in the target region. This provides a wider picture of the brand's digital footprint, including how local consumers perceive it, what they say, and the overall sentiment.
Not only does this help with monitoring, but it enables companies to be more proactive in instances where they might not have been able to, such as having geo-specific SEO strategies – see more below.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine ranking is an understated but important aspect of digital reputation. Being top-ranked is a demonstration of popularity and a form of social proof in its own right. It also makes positive reviews and feedback more visible, further enhancing your brand’s credibility, trustworthiness, and authority.
Proxy solutions are key to a strong SEO strategy. Once again, part of this comes down to scraping search engine result pages (SERPs) reliably and consistently without being IP banned and leveraging this data as part of an SEO strategy.
Likewise, proxy solutions allow businesses to implement a global SEO strategy by enabling them to access SERPs from different regions, which is crucial for brands looking to improve their visibility and reputation in specific markets.
Even companies without an international presence can benefit as search results change within different parts of the same country. Proxy solutions, therefore, are invaluable for businesses looking to scrape in specific localities.
Naturally, this is only possible with proxy solutions with global data centres and multiple servers in different parts of different countries.
Trusted Proxies
Managing your organisation’s digital reputation is crucial today, where a brand's online presence is a significant factor in determining its market value. Proxy solutions are key to this.
With global server locations and self-healing features, Trusted Proxies allows companies to bypass geo-restrictions, scrape search engine result pages without being IP banned, and easily monitor their digital reputation.
By leveraging the power of proxy solutions, companies can take control of their digital reputation and enhance their brand's credibility, trustworthiness, and authority.
For more information on how proxy solutions can help manage your brand’s digital reputation, please contact us and we will gladly discuss it.
