By Sharon Robinson
If you are surfing the Net and don’t realize that every keystroke you make and every search you instigate is being monitored than you have no right to be on the Net. Information is being gathered at all times to feed this beast that is the Internet; information that is available to virtually everyone for the right price.
This information is vital if you are running a business with an online presence. Never has it been easier to monitor your competition than with the Internet. The Internet has served to destroy barriers to entry in most fields and encourages small and medium sized businesses to broaden their horizons and seek growth via exports to foreign countries. It is this fostering of competition that means that you must keep a closer eye on your competitors than ever because every niche that is perceived as being profitable quickly attracts an inordinate amount of competition. In cyberspace it is the quick or the dead.
If your competition is worth keeping an eye on then rest assured they are targeting overseas markets with tailored content and advertising to suit local tastes. The foreign sites will probably require different keywords and will attract local advertising as another revenue source. So why not monitor their offshore strategies and perhaps copy what you deem to be their successful campaigns. After all, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and all is fair in love and business.
However, when you perform searches, the search is tailored to your previous search patterns and also localized for content. Via your IP address, the servers know where you are based and respond accordingly. Using a proxy server though, you can check your competition with impunity, safe in the knowledge that you cannot be tracked and your competition will never know you have been checking them out.
Similarly, you can receive accurate search results from foreign websites of your competitors by using a proxy server in the country from which you want to receive the search results. For example, if you want to see how your competitor is tackling the Swedish market, you can connect to a Swedish proxy server and receive localized Swedish search results.
Although there are free proxy services that usually compel you to receive free advertising, it is best to pay for a premium proxy such as GeoSurf where you are assured premium service and you may even select from over 100 countries from which to “surf.” The cost is not exorbitant and it is a legitimate business write-off.