Many understand that the clever application of relevant data extracted in real-time is how online businesses can grow and thrive quickly and continuously. However, a brand residing in the UK might not succeed or experience only partial growth if they focus on public data from the UK websites alone. To grow properly, the brand would need to refocus and collect important public data from all over the world. This is mostly because both existing and potential customers may reside in different parts of the world. Also, discussion and reviews concerning the brand may be dropped in forums and groups outside the UK.
It then becomes imperative that an online brand collects public data from different parts of the internet. Some of this data may, however, be found in forbidden servers, yet online businesses will need to access geo-blocked content if they wish to reap the full benefits of applying user data.
What is Geo-Blocking?
Sometimes, some online brands may be located physically in regions that some websites and servers do not allow access to their content. This is what we call geo-blocking.
Geo-blocking is a process of preventing or obstructing access to a website or server based on a specific location. The geo-blocking technology is usually used by governments or private businesses to stop internet protocol (IP) addresses from certain locations from accessing specific servers or content.
Once implemented, the protocol works automatically to ensure that no one from the target region can access the blocked website or content and perform web scraping.
On the one hand, this favors the implementing companies on two solid fronts. First, it is a strong form of digital protection that ensures the safety of copyrighted and licensed content. That is to say that geo-blocking helps businesses protect their properties and prevent infringement. Secondly, this type of blocking also helps to ensure that products and services are shown only to the target marketing. This is also called specific market focusing and helps to prevent the waste of time and other resources.
On the other hand, geo-blocking can be very detrimental to the targeted businesses as all businesses residing in the geo-blocked location become unable to access content that will, otherwise, help their brand grow and make improvements.
Why Companies Need to Access Geo-Restricted Data
Below are some of the reasons why companies need access to geo-restricted data:
- For Competition Monitoring and Analysis
Watching the competition closing and seeing how they do business has helped many brands grow and improve, and the best way to do this is to access data from restricted websites. The data gathered can be used to perform decent comparison and analyses that can help brands understand their competitors better and know how to outperform them.
- For Price Monitoring and Market Analysis
Price monitoring and market analysis are two crucial steps to help a brand set prices based on market data. This does not only help maximize sales and profit but also help provide genuine customer satisfaction. And in most cases, the data needed for these processes can only be derived from restricted websites.
- For Brand Protection
Brand protection strategies are usually intentional measures taken to safeguard the name and reputation of a brand online. This means knowing what has been said about the brand in different parts of the internet, and most times, this includes restricted areas.
- For Generating Leads
Many companies spend fortunes trying to create their local database of helpful information about their customers to help them deliver more customer-oriented services.
However, a cheaper way to generate leads is to access restricted servers and extract the necessary information quickly and accurately.
Best Ways to Access Geo-Restricted Content
Geo-restriction is a thing, and more companies are getting affected by it by the passing day as the need for more data does not seem to be dwindling. Hence online businesses need to find a way around this challenge.
One of the best solutions to overcoming geo-blocking is the use of proxies. For instance, if our UK Company we cited earlier wants to access restricted content in another part of the world (say, Indonesia), the most effective way would be to use an Indonesia proxy. Visit the Oxylabs website to read more about an Indonesia proxy.
Proxies are tools that can serve as middlemen accepting and delivering connections on behalf of clients. Most proxies do this while using their IP address and locations. They also conceal the client’s IP and location at the same time.
When brands route their connections through proxies, it becomes impossible for the target website to pin them to their actual physical location, thereby eliminating the geo-blocking.
Conclusion
The internet is growing, and more brands and people are coming in to do business and use other services, making internet data more important. And even though more businesses and governments are setting up geo-blocking, data remains an integral part of any brand’s growth.
Hence, brands residing in geographically restricted areas must find a way to beat these restrictions, and it has been agreed that one of the best ways to do this is to use proper proxy servers.
