HOW IMPORTANT IS SEO ON BAIDU?
Baidu is China’s leading search engine and the 5th most visited website in the world. China has become a huge online market, with 1.05 billion internet users. The internet is today one of the most important ways to reach the Chinese market, so Baidu SEO and other SEO strategies are essential for reaching the growing number of Chinese citizens who use it.
Foreign companies wanting to communicate online with a Chinese audience are advised to use China’s local search engine Baidu rather than Google, which accounts for only 4.85% of the sector in China, while Baidu currently holds 55.8% of the market (February 2023 data). To optimise a website for the Chinese market, it is essential to focus on Baidu SEO. At first it may be hard to understand how to do SEO in China because of the strict internet regulations. The first step to improving Baidu SEO is to obtain an ICP (Internet Content Provider) licence from the Chinese authorities, which will allow the website to load faster. Baidu prefers sites hosted on Chinese servers. Another important step is having a domain name with a Chinese extension, .cn or .com.cn. Baidu only indexes Chinese characters, so it is essential to have your site translated into Simplified Mandarin Chinese.
Baidu’s algorithm prioritises the use of relevant keywords. Unlike Google, Baidu prefers precise, specific keywords. So to rank higher on Baidu, it is essential to use detailed, specific keywords on the website. Baidu Index is a valuable tool for keyword optimisation, providing accurate data on internet users’ search trends. Baidu also gives significant weight to meta descriptions combined with title tags. It is important to make sure on-page and off-page keywords are consistent to avoid penalties from Baidu. Besides keyword optimisation, click-through rate (CTR) is a crucial factor in Baidu’s algorithm. One of the fundamentals Baidu relies on is metadata. A consistent title with relevant keywords can achieve an optimal ranking for the tag, even if the content is inconsistent.
To increase traffic to the website, it is important to actively promote it online in relevant spaces. There are several ways to improve Baidu rankings through off-site SEO; here are the main ones:
- Brand promotion: this includes publishing relevant content, videos and images on as many Chinese websites as possible.
- Sponsored ads on Baidu: Baidu has a PPC (pay-per-click) platform very similar to Google AdWords, called Baidu Phoenix Nest. This Baidu platform ranks websites higher according to their spending level and improves your position in the PPC rankings.
- News posts: to take full advantage of this, you need to submit your news posts through the Baidu News Protocol.
Although sponsored ads on Baidu are useful for launching a site and getting traffic at the start, in the long run an SEO strategy proves more beneficial. Organic traffic is higher quality than paid traffic, and views are more stable. Organic results may not appear above paid ads, but they still generate a significant amount of quality traffic.
