Baidu SEO : An Understanding Of Your Audience & User Intent
Understanding your audience is one of the most important parts of marketing in general. Many companies entering the Chinese market expect that their audience in China will like the same things that their audiences in other markets like. While this can be true, it is often not.
Market research can be costly in terms of both time and money, so many companies skip this step and jump right into marketing. This can lead to major mistakes and wasted budget for foreign companies.
One of the most important steps to achieving success in SEO on both Google and Baidu is understanding user behaviour and search intent. Both of these should play a key role in formulating your SEO strategy, so take the time to understand your audience in terms of their expectations and how they interact with companies in your industry.
Baidu SEO : A Well Thought Out Keyword Strategy
Keyword research is one of the most important parts of SEO. Like with Google, there are plenty of keyword research tools available in the China market.
These tools allow companies to determine the difficulty in ranking for a specific keyword and an estimate of how many times users search that given phrase per month. This can be very helpful for determining which keywords to target for your company’s content team. You can check out a fewof these tools below:
Chinaz keywords Tool
Baidu Keyword Planner
5118 keywords Tool
Ciku5 Keywords Tool
One thing these tools can’t tell you is the user’s intent when searching a given keyword. Having no knowledge of user intent can make it a bit more difficult to determine which keywords to target.
For example, imagine you ran a Facebook marketing agency. You want to try and rank #1 for the keyword “Facebook.” Ultimately you would have a very hard time ranking for this keyword, because the intent of users searching for this term is almost certainly just to go to the Facebook website. Chances are you don’t even want these users searching for Facebook on your site either as they likely aren’t looking for Facebook marketing services.
Focusing on longer more specific keywords can often yield better results. It usually takes less time to rank for these keywords given that they have smaller search volume and less competition. Not only but the traffic you receive from these longer keywords will likely be exactly the audience you’re looking for!
Achieving success on Google in English is tough enough, so if you’re looking to succeed on Baidu I always recommend working with a Chinese SEO Agency.
Baidu SEO : Tips & Tricks for Ranking On Baidu
Create a Positive User Experience
The Chinese internet is full of spam, pop-up ads, and low quality content. Baidu’s latest algorithms have been focusing on trying to improve the quality of content appearing in search results by punishing sites that implement these tactics.
This has been a long time coming, and is expected to have significant effects on Baidu’s search results. This is an important point for Baidu, as it has had quite a few scandals over the last couple years resulting in a lack of trust for the platform. By improving the quality of its search results it hopes to improve its brand image and regain the trust of users in China.
It’s due to these reasons that these updates will likely be strictly enforced in the coming years. Baidu’s goal in introducing these updates is to improve the overall quality of its search results in terms of user experience and correct information. If you have features on your website that severely detract from the user experience it’s best to remove them if you want to rank on Baidu!
Build Links, But Be Careful!
If you know anything about SEO, you know that links are an important component of every SEO strategy. While links on Baidu play an important role in determining the authority of a website, they also help to enforce Chinese censorship laws.
Website authority is an important factor in ranking on Baidu. Websites like Zhihu (知乎) for example have very high authority which results in their content appearing on the first and second pages of Baidu search results. This authority stems almost entirely from links. Building links is a time-consuming process but is incredibly worthwhile.
Links are important both in China and the West, there are some additional risks associated with link-building in China. While almost every company knows not to put any politically sensitive content on their websites many don’t realize that they can even be punished for linking to sites that contain this kind of content. Sites could also be punished this makes monitoring links much more important when working in China.
Mobile Optimization for Search
Linda Lin, General Manager of Baidu reported that over 80% of searches on Baidu were made through mobile devices. This trend of users accessing search engines through mobile devices has made Baidu place a higher emphasis on the mobile user experience over desktop. The China Network and Information Center (CNNIC) confirmed this trend in its latest report when it found that over 99.1% of Chinese internet users access the internet through their mobile devices.
However, Baidu isn’t the only one to notice this trend, Google also recently introduced mobile first indexing for its search results, which also places a higher emphasis on the mobile version of a website as opposed to desktop.
So what does this actually mean I’m sure you’re wondering? It means that while having a desktop site is important, mobile should now be your first priority. While mobile phones have become a part of our daily lives for what seems like forever now, many companies treat their mobile websites like an after-thought.
These latest updates from Baidu guide and Google are both aiming to change the way that we think about mobile websites and placing a higher priority on providing a good user experience for mobile users.
If you want to succeed in SEO on Baidu, you’ll need to ensure that you’re delivering a satisfactory experience on mobile. As with the current state of affairs you likely won’t be able to rank without it!
