Chinese Search Engine Optimization (Baidu SEO)

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Chinese Search Engine Optimization (Baidu SEO)

Who Are the Leaders in China Search Engine Market?

By now, most businesses are aware of the extreme importance of Search Engine Optimization – if potential customers can’t find you on Google, you won’t get their business. This is also true for the Chinese market – except for one key fact: Google is NOT the default search engine of China, Baidu is.

By the end of 2013, Baidu held 64% of the search engine market share in China. The other two players in the market are 360 with 22% and Sogou at 10%. Google left the mainland China market back in 2011 and most Google services are not accessible in mainland China.

What this means is, for western companies trying to grow in the China market, they must pay attention to Baidu SEO, in order to be discovered by Chinese consumers.

That being said, Google remains an important search engine for businesses trying to reach out to Chinese consumers outside of mainland China.

Baidu SEO Poses a Great Challenge for Western Companies

There are many significant differences in SEO best practices between Baidu and Google, here are just a few examples:

All content and metadata should be written in simplified Chinese characters. Baidu prefer simplified Chinese characters and does not like romanized characters at all.
In Chinese language, one single word can have up to 7 different meanings, depending on the 5 tones and the phrases it is in. Therefore all words in content need to be checked for relevance and possible misinterpretations to ensure the correct words are chosen. From a marketing point of view, this means that your SEO specialist needs to be a native Chinese speaker who is also proficient in English.
Baidu gives preference to sites hosted in China, and sites with “.cn” domain names.
Baidu does not like sites with multi domains and sub-domains.
Baidu also blacklisted certain keywords according to Chinese law requirements.

Above are just a very small subset of things to consider while doing SEO for China, contact us if you would like to dive deeper.

How We Help

We take care every aspect of your SEO efforts for the Chinese market: from technical SEO requirements to content planning and integration with social media, blogging and website localization.

Our advantages:

All of our SEO specialists are native Chinese speakers with western education from US and Canada.
We are experts for both Baidu SEO and Google SEO. We offer a seamless SEO service between your English language sites and your Chinese language website.