With Baidu having close to an 80% market share, optimising for this powerful search engine is essential for competitiveness in the Chinese digital marketing landscape.
Content is at the heart of Baidu optimisation. Creating great content can help you rank well, get noticed by your target market, and engage with them.
Here’s how to optimise your content for Baidu.
Content marketing for Baidu
Your content needs to be high quality, relevant and interesting to your audience in order to rank well on Baidu. It also needs to be unique – just like Google, duplicate or low-quality content will risk a penalty on Baidu.
According to Search Engine Land, Baidu’s ranking factors include the following:
- Correct language – content and tags should be written in simplified Chinese characters.
- Clear content definitions – especially since a single word in Chinese could convey several different meanings. This makes it vital to use a person fluent in Chinese and English to translate your content, rather than a software program.
- Keywords and popular search terms – while these are not as relevant for Google as they once were, they still hold sway with Baidu, although it’s important not to overuse them.
- Backlinks – as for keywords, link building is an important factor for Baidu.
- Fresh content – it’s important to regularly post new content, such as blog articles, to increase the visibility of your site. Articles should also be submitted to Baidu’s newsfeed.
- Local hosting – hosting your site in China will ensure faster page load times than if you host offshore.
Putting it into practice
While these factors need to be taken into consideration, remember that the whole point of your content is to communicate with real people.
Provide solutions to problems they may be grappling with, or give them information they need. Make your content engaging and entertaining, as well as informative.
Here are some tips:
- Provide content that is relevant to your specific target audiences. This may require segmenting your audiences into categories according to their demographics, needs and interests.
- Vary the content types – you can do this by using videos, images and infographics as well as text.
- Share on Chinese social media platforms – social media is often used by Chinese netizens to check out goods and services, so make sure to share your content regularly.
- Listen as well as speak. In China, relationships are particularly important. Listen to what people say and want, and respond to comments on forums and social sites.
- Deliver on your promises. Positive reviews can be pretty powerful in China, so make sure to always provide top quality service.
Content is just as important for increasing your visibility on Baidu as it is on Google, and it should form a key part of your overall marketing strategy. For assistance with content marketing in China, contact our bilingual team!