Most people associate VPNs with something shady, such as accessing the dark web to do illicit stuff or to access torrent sites in order to download copyrighted content. As such I have noticed that almost no internet marketers and business people use them.
This is a huge mistake in my opinion, as a VPN can greatly enhance your internet marketing efforts.
In this article I will be talking about how a good VPN can help you make your online marketing more effective and as such will not be discussing how actually a VPN works and how you will have to set it up, as it would take away too much time. You can find a detailed description of what VPNs are and how they work here. I believe that article does an excellent job explaining what a VPN is and how it works.
So, lets get back on topic and see some concrete examples of how a VPN can improve your online marketing efforts.
1. It allows you to see local search results with absolute precision
If you are into internet marketing that means you are also doing SEO regularly. You will constantly have to watch your search results and track ranking for various keywords and often in various countries. There are several online tools that can help you but they are not always truly accurate for several reasons.
In this case you can switch the language of your Google account and go to the local google version and fire out the search term you wish to check. BUT there is a problem with this. Google will detect that you are not actually physically located in that country and it will show you somewhat different results.
This is where a VPN comes in, as it will allow you to switch your IP address to that of the country you intend to make the search in.
2. It helps you in local keyword research
Again, there are many tools that can help you research keywords online, but most accurate way is still the manual way using the Google related terms and suggested search functions. Every time you start typing a search term in Google it will give you in a drop-down format a list of autocomplete suggestions which are based on the most popular searches.
Likewise, once you have pressed enter and are able to see the search results, on the bottom of the page it will show you a list of related or similar searches.
You can then take these related and suggested terms and include them in your articles or even create completely new articles based on these terms.
Like in the first point, you will only able to properly pull this off if you make Google believe you are actually located in the country in question. Those results will also depend on the location you are in, even if you write in English and search for a US related key-phrase. It will give you different results, say, if you are in Germany. It doesn’t matter you made the search on google.com in English for the term “USA VPN companies”.
But if you are using a VPN and choose a US IP, everything will look identical as it would for someone actually located in the US.
3. A VPN helps with competitor research
You may (or may not) know that many websites display different content for different countries. You may even consider doing too in case you are interested in marketing certain products and serves in different countries on the same website.
So, you may end up on a competitor’s website and seeing certain type of content and then not understanding how that competitor could operate in a certain country.
That could be because you’re maybe seeing a different kind of content than what people see in a different country.
You may be located in Germany and notice that a site only has 2-3 products displayed on its website but you also see in Semrush that they are doing PPC in the United States and you don’t understand how they can do that with such limited number of products.
So, what you will have to do is to fire up a VPN and check out that website how it looks in the United States. You could end up noticing that it has completely different kind of content and products displayed there so it will all makes sense now.
You can then look at that content and products that are being presented on the US website to develop your own website accordingly or to develop or promote similar products.
4. You can hide your own identity
If you are an online marketer you may not want all kinds of people to find out your real identity. It’s not that you are shady or something but it’s always better to be discrete and play safe.
If you are an online marketer you will get into contact with all kinds of people, will have to use all kinds of online platforms and visit all kinds of different websites. These will all leave a footprint and there are ways to track these to discover your real identity and even the precise location you are residing.
With a VPN you can hide your real location making it impossible for anyone to find out how you really are or where you are located at.
5. Hide your online activities from your ISP
As an online marketer you may be promoting certain products in certain countries that are completely legitimate in those countries but are blocked from your own. For example, if you are a casino affiliate located in the United States you can legally promote casino sites in Europe but cannot do the same in the US.
But this might get into conflict with your ISP because they will notice you accessing casino sites very frequently and believing that you are doing something against the law.
You can avoid this by using a VPN, which will encrypt all your incoming and outgoing web-traffic so that not even your ISP will be able to see what websites you are visiting.
So, as you can see there is a huge number of reasons why you should be using a VPN in case you are an online marketer. Given these tips here, I’m sure you can come up with dozens of other unique reasons yourself as well.
So in a nutshell, VPN helps one to go anonymous and execute the internet marketing efforts which otherwise would have been difficult to execute with precision. Good post!
Hi Eric. Glad that you liked the post 🙂