How can a VPN enhance your webmaster and SEO experience?

A VPN can be useful in a wide range of circumstances. It can help to keep you safe online, be used to overcome geo-restrictions and allows you to browse the web anonymously. However, did you know you could use a VPN to enhance your webmaster and SEO experience?

Here we are going to look at three of the ways it can do just this.

1. Check local SEO

Checking SEO is essential. While checking local results is relatively easy, checking your results in other countries poses a bigger challenge.

One way of checking is to use a VPN and gain access to the thousands of servers offered. Say you are located in the USA but want to check SEO in the United Kingdom. You would simply sign up with a provider and choose a server in the UK. 

Having done so you take on a UK IP address and you get localised SEO results. 

2. Check website propagation

If you start-up a new website, change to a new hosting provider or make changes to the DNS of an existing website it can cause issues with the site. 

You might check to find out if the website is up and running in your own country and all is fine, but what about in other countries?

The DNS changes may not have reflected around the world as it takes time. This is due to every server in the world having to register the information for your domain. During this time, the cached version of your website is shown. 

It can take a few days for things to settle down and your website to show correctly. To test if the site is available in certain countries just connect to a server located in the country you want to check using the VPN. 

3. Bypass IP address blacklists

Your IP address can be blacklisted for numerous reasons. It could be on just a single list or multiple. It gets even more confusing when you realise that the blacklists are not governed by just one source and each has different standards for listing addresses. 

An IP address may be blacklisted for numerous reasons including spam, malware and viruses. 

If yours is blacklisted you can get around it by connecting to a server offered by the VPN. When you do this your own IP address is masked, and you take one on from the server in the country to which you connected. 

As you are not using your own IP you overcome the block and access the internet freely.