You may have heard about the differences between Google and Baidu. But are you aware that, the key differences between Google and Baidu can significantly affect how to optimize and develop an effective search marketing strategy for Chinese market?
There is no doubt that, Baidu is the most important search engine that you should spend time with in China. As a matter of fact, at this moment (March 2021) Baidu has a dominant share (75.5%) of the search engine market in China.
Ahead of embarking on any Chinese marketing strategy, it’s crucial that you define key measurable goals and how you’re going to track them. A key part of this is getting Baidu Tongji (百度统计) and Baidu Ziyuan (百度资源) installed correctly on your site.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to develop your search marketing strategy for China effectively, and what the key differences between two major search engines, Google and Baidu are.
Zhihu, the best Question and Answer social network in China
Baidu’s diversified portfolio in China
Chinese internet users interact with internet servises in a very different way, which has been reflected by the diversified portfolio of Baidu. Baidu operates more than 50 different products ranging from Search through to Maps, an encyclopedia, and anti-virus services.
Moveover, Baidu has dipped into a lot of markets ranging from Baijob (a job meta-search), Qunar (a travel meta-search), and IQiyi (a big entertainment streaming site) over past a few years.
It’s therefore important to understand that some users could, in theory, interact only with Baidu services and products througout their search behavior. One of the major reasons is that, Baidu’s search results pages often tend to heavily augment with their own properties, so getting high levels of traffic and engagement isn’t as simple as ranking in the linear 1 to 10.
Baidu Tongji uses a very different approach to deliver SEO report to the users.
Google vs. Baidu
There are a number of major differences between these two search engines, which will signigficantly affect your strategy. Your exisiting Google SEO strategy isn’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to Chinese market.
Before going into those more intensive differences you’ll need to consider in developing your strategy, there are some smaller ones to take into consideration, these being:
- All content should be in simplified Chinese. Whilst this should be a given, also take note to translate structural content such as widgets, sidebars, menus, footers, and important in-image text. Well, it is possible that some English content can be relevant, but considering of the language barrier in the market, it will be a wise move for you to build a simplified Chinese content team for the online approaches.
- Baidu can still be influenced by meta keywords, so these should be optimized in the same way you’d optimize a page for keywords (not spammed site-wide in a bid to increase relevancy).
- Baidu’s image AI isn’t yet at the same level as Google’s, despite Baidu being a leader in machine learning. In most cases, you need to rely on your image alt texts and metadata to improve Baidu’s image understanding and your chances of ranking in image search.
- Baidu doesn’t really have a good reputation when it comes to crawling JavaScript, so make sure that all your important content and links are served in plain HTML on both the mobile and desktop versions of your website.
Potential to Speed Up Baidu Indexing
A key difference between Baidu and Google is how Baidu goes about crawling and indexing websites. Anecdotally, Baidu’s bots can be aggressive crawlers but when it comes to indexing, the search engine differs a lot from Google.
Usually Google will slowly index a website as it discovers URLs. However with Baidu, you can influence and speed up this process through marketing and PR.
This increases the demand for your brand/website by generating searches and positive user signals.
Sina Weibo is one of the most popular social networks in China.
The Impact of Chinese Social Media on Baidu SEO
The impact of Chinese social media on Baidu SEO, is probably one of the most common questions raised by new players in Chinese market.
Whilst WeChat and Sina Weibo are the more popular social networks in China, users also frequently use at least a dozen other social networks, such as Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili or Douyin, depending on which industry they are in. It is worth mentioning that, quite some names on this list, e.g. Zhihu, Tieba and Douban, are owned by Baidu.
So when it comes to SEO, it will be a smart idea to invest in the Baidu platforms with unique content, as well as aiming for a good presence on other networks especially WeChat and Sina Weibo. It is important for you to understand that, content strategy for WeChat is significantly different from Weibo due to their natures. In this artcle, let’s focus on Weibo first.
A strong Weibo strategy can not only help your brand rank for topical and real-time queries (much like the Twitter carousel), but also help you take more real estate on SERPs for your brand searches at Baidu.
It’s also important that you:
- Update your Weibo page frequently, and try generating more original posts instead of just sharing/copying content from other social media channels and your site.
- Gain as many followers as possible as data correlates that for non-branded queries, Baidu takes into account the number of genuine page followers as a factor to determine your site authority.
- Follow Sina Weibo guidelines to have your page verified as official, as these tend to perform better in Search for both branded and non-branded phrases.
Don’t Ignore Mobile Web Design
Mobile search (and indexing) has been important in search for a few years, with more in the SEO industry taking action since Google announced and rolled out their Mobile-Friendly update.
Same trend appeared in Chinese internet world, probably in a more aggressive way. China hit a mobile internet access share of 66% by 2010, and by end of 2019, there are already more than 1.3 billioon mobile internet users in the country.
As a result, it’s vital that your mobile site is as capable as your desktop site in both technical and user performance. If you are launching a new website, it will be a good investment if you start with a responsive web design.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you could probably benefit from Baidu’s App Transcoding, which will take your page’s content from non-mobile-friendly pages and convert it into a mobile-friendly “interface”.
However as Baidu will remove any elements it determines not mobile-friendly in this process, you could lose key images, content pieces, or importantly CTAs and conversion elements. This can also be bad for your performance reporting and conversions as well.
Technically, these pages are served by *.baidu.com, so won’t trigger your analytics tracking codes or event triggers.
