When you’re developing a Chinese digital marketing strategy, your Chinese website is the cornerstone of your brand’s digital hub. Once you’ve developed it, the goal is to grow high-quality traffic with strong conversions.

For many brands, the initial focus will be on Baidu PPC advertising, to drive those initial leads quickly and efficiently. However, Baidu PPC is expensive and unsustainable on its own. For the longer term, Baidu SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) becomes the focus. In this article, we’ll look at ways to use Baidu SEO to benefit your Chinese website.

Why invest in Baidu SEO

Get your Baidu SEO strategy right and you can:

• Build your website’s Baidu ranking for targeted Chinese keywords, for better visibility and SERPs.
• Ensure your target Chinese audience can easily find your website through organic search.
• Grow quality organic search traffic to your Chinese website – and the volume of conversions to sales.

It’s important to know that search-optimised websites still have an incredibly important role in Chinese digital marketing, particularly for products and services that require research. Chinese social media is ubiquitous and a key tool in the Chinese digital marketing mix, but your Chinese-language website is vital for brand authority and trust-building.

How to master Baidu SEO

Baidu isn’t only the leading Chinese search engine, it’s also arguably the most complex, with the biggest database and most complex algorithm. Furthermore, it offers additional services that go beyond search. With this in mind, here are some key strategies to focus on.

1. Begin with the basics

There are no shortcuts with SEO! So:

• Begin by building a quality Chinese website with a Chinese domain name and local hosting.
• Develop it according to Chinese UX principles with correct indexing, and all necessary tags and backlinks.
• Integrate your Chinese website into your broader digital hub (for example, Chinese social media accounts).
• Focus on populating it with targeted, optimised and quality content, relevant to your customers.
• Ensure you use simplified Chinese on your website, and translate search terms with care (see below.)

2. Have a plan

Baidu is a vast search engine with a complex algorithm that factors in nuanced factors such as Chinese culture, Chinese user behaviour and government censorship. Baidu favours Chinese websites and content that will truly meet the needs of its human users.

To build a Baidu SEO strategy, it is important to understand the complex linguistic, cultural and technical elements of Baidu and target your brand’s Chinese website to meet the needs of the Chinese market. This means meeting the needs of your target customers as well as government content regulations.

It’s important not to see Baidu as ‘another Google’, but to treat it as a unique entity and seek to understand it fully. This requires a time and knowledge investment.

3. Factor in Baidu’s other services

Baidu also offers additional high-value services to its users. This includes Baidu Zhidao, the Q&A forum which has excellent community engagement. Western brands can use Baidu Zhidao to build their presence and provide useful information to potential customers.

There is also Baidu Baike – comparable to Wikipedia – which businesses can use for posting branded articles for reputation building and positive SERP listings.

4. Localise your Chinese website

Baidu is mainly accessed in simplified Chinese, so it’s helpful to use this on your website and also very carefully work with appropriately translated search terms. If your translations are inaccurate, they will affect your Baidu ranking.

5. Work with keywords and metadata

For Baidu SEO success, you must find the right keywords for your brand and then incorporate them into your content. Baudi favours precise keywords (unlike Google, that will work with queries and looser terms). There are tools to help you master Baidu keywords, such as Baidu Keyword Planner and Baidu Index.

As part of this, it’s important to carry out market research to see how your competitors are ranking on Baidu, and work on adding accurate metadata to your content such as the meta description, keyword tags, alt tags, title and header tags etc (Baidu values metadata!)

6. Create original and relevant content

Although there must be a focus on integrating keywords and optimising metadata on your Chinese language website, there is no substitute for creating original, relevant and high-quality content.

Look for the latest topics, trends and updates that are relevant to your customers and create a content plan that can be delivered throughout the year. Active websites tend to be more favorably ranked, but do avoid any duplicate content, and always remember to follow censorship regulations. If you fall foul of censorship guidelines, your website can be blacklisted.

7. Build Links

Many marketers don’t realise that Baidu tends to favourably rank websites with plenty of backlinks. The best kinds are links to and from reputable, or high-authority, Chinese websites such as Chinese government websites or Chinese media platforms.

Quantity matters as much as quality here, so build backlinks from smaller websites too. Additionally, focus on your internal anchoring links that optimise the user journey within your own website. These actions will all build your rankings with Baidu.

8. Remember ‘mobile first’ and responsive

China is a nation of smartphone users, and Baidu values mobile optimisation and ranks smartphpone-friendly websites favourably. If you don’t optimise your content for mobile-first users, Baidu can transcode your website automatically, which may not provide the translation or UX results you hoped for. Focus on building a smartphone-optimized, responsive website.

As an additional point, bear in mind that Baidu cannot read iframes or Flash, so don’t use it on any website sections that have an SEO purpose. Basic HTML is the best approach for rankings.

9. Invest in technical actions

Baidu can only accurately index your website if you submit a sitemap. This may need to be done at different points over your website’s lifespan, via the Baidu open-source platform. This is made easier with some technical knowledge (for example, checking your site is verified via your server’s root directory.)

You may also wish to ensure your Chinese website has a HTTPS address rather than HTTP for enhanced data transmission security.

When your website is live, remember to keep monitoring its performance using Baidu Tongji (Baidu Ananlytics) and Baidu Webmaster tools. These will allow you to keep refining your approach.

10. Get help

A Chinese digital marketing agency can help you with all of these Baidu success strategies listed above, as well as other approaches that can be more complex, but offer real value to your brand.

A strong Baidu SEO strategy is an essential component of your overall Chinese digital marketing strategy, and it takes time, expertise and continual refinement to optimise your search engine rankings. Remember too that your industry competitors will constantly be investing in their own SEO work, so the playing field is always changing and competition for rankings will always be fierce.

Market Me China can assist you with this work. Our native language speakers have the professional digital marketing expertise you need to succeed with your Baidu SEO, as part of a powerful and integrated digital marketing strategy. We work with businesses across all industries to deliver measurable results that really maximise their ROI.

To find out more, please contact our team today!