Today, it is no longer enough for organizations to advertise their products and services online. Markets are pretty saturated, and so companies need to put extra effort into making sure they come out on top. In particular, businesses need to drive traffic to their websites, much like brick-and-mortar shop owners convince would-be customers to come through their doors.

One of the most effective ways to do that is by making your company’s domain rank with the help of innovative search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Apart from just stuffing content with the right keywords for search engines to track, SEO has a technical aspect to it as well, and a reverse IP search tool like Reverse IP/DNS Lookup can help enhance it.

We’ll delve into the more technical aspect of SEO in this post, but first, let’s discuss why SEO is vital for any organization that does business online.

Why Should Companies Get Involved With SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing a website to feature specific keywords that make it rank higher in search engines like Google. Organizations usually put a lot of effort into SEO because as many as 95% of online searchers only look at the first page of search engine results. And so companies who want to gain traffic need to exert effort to make it to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

It’s a tough challenge, yet various techniques and solutions such as Reverse IP/DNS Lookup may be able to help. We identified four specific ways in the next section.

4 Ways Reverse IP Search Tools Ease SEO

Reverse IP search tools provide users with a list of all the domains that share an IP address. Knowing that information can help SEO experts to:

1. Prevent Web Hosting Oversubscription

When you decide to take your brand online, you need to choose if you’ll use a dedicated or a shared IP address. Going for a dedicated IP address is better for handling as much traffic as possible yet the costs may be something your business is not ready for.

For organizations with smaller budgets, opting for shared IP addresses doesn’t have to make SEO efforts moot. You just need to choose a hosting provider or plan that doesn’t host too many domains on a single IP address. 

Why is that? Oversubscription can slow down website loading time. And that isn’t good in that almost half of site visitors expect pages to load in less than two seconds. Any more than that, and they’re bound to leave your website, thus increasing your bounce rate. A higher bounce rate translates into lower SEO ranking. What’s more, Google includes page loading time as a criterion for SERP ranking.

Bearing this in mind, SEO experts can do a reverse IP search to see how many domains share their IP address(es) and keep track of oversubscription.

2. Check Your Neighbors’ Reputation

IP addresses can be blacklisted, which, as we know, may cause a huge or even irreparable dent on a brand’s image. That is why every website owner needs to make sure that his/her IP address maintains a good reputation. Remember that no amount of SEO will help if your site is on someone’s blocklist.

To avoid such a predicament, you can use Reverse IP/DNS Lookup as the first step to making sure you’re not “neighbors” with a disreputable domain. Afterward, you can run each domain on Domain Reputation API or Threat Intelligence Platform to see if it has any ties to malicious activity. And if you should find a bad apple, you can switch IP addresses or hosts.

3. Avoid Sharing Hosts with Doorway Pages

Doorway pages help websites get more traffic. These usually get stuffed with SEO keywords to the point that their content no longer makes sense, and search engines tag them as “spammy.” Just as you need to stay away from malicious websites, you need to steer clear of doorway pages, too.

Using a list of neighbors from a reverse IP search, mark off domains that act as doorway pages, if any. You can ask your host to assign you a cleaner IP address or move to a different host if that isn’t possible.

4. Make Sure You’re In Good Company

As much as you’d like to stay away from bad neighbors, you should also enjoy having good ones. Sharing an IP address with highly reputable websites can be a win for your company.

Subject your co-IP address owners obtained via a reverse IP search to a reputation check. You can benefit from their good standing, too.

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Organizations need to make sure their SEO efforts always line up with their business goals. But for SEO to work, they need to maintain a threat-free domain. Reverse IP searches using Reverse IP/DPS API can help.