Baidu is without doubt the leader amongst Chinese search engines. But optimizing for Baidu is not the same as for Google, and by doing so it’s unlikely you’ll find your site ranking near the top of page 1. Baidu SEO strategies come with their own challenges like complex language issues, cultural differences, user behavior, censorship, and technicalities.
Baidu does not restrict itself only to search, but also offers other services including cloud computing, travel sites, maps, music and video platforms, and a lot more. Similar to Google, Baidu makes the vast majority of its revenue by selling ads on its search result pages and ad network.
Let’s take a look at what is important in order to rank on Baidu:
On/Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO helps the engine identify what your webpage is all about while off-page SEO helps in ranking it. It is all about making it easier for search engine spiders to index your site’s content and understand what each page on the site is about, which will help rank the page for relevant content.
Keyword Placement
As Baidu’s ranking algorithms are not as advanced and well-thought-out as Google’s, it can still be a good idea to follow old school on-page SEO best practices. Even so, you should still ensure target keywords and their variants occur naturally in page content, and not engage in keyword stuffing, which can be highly detrimental to your total page ranking.
Optimizing URLs
Although browsers and search engines support using Chinese characters in URLs and domain names, it’s still not a highly recommended practice. It’s possible that they may be difficult to type, read, or pronounce for a number of users, and will be displayed as percent-encoded, which is only readable by the search engine crawlers. So while it might help your page ranking by a small factor, it will definitely hurt your user experience which is worse.
Reasons To Optimize Your Site For Baidu SEO On Mobile
Huge Opportunities
Just as the growth in mobile search has impacted Google SEO, mobile search in China is growing at an even faster rate since the majority of the people are using phones for searching things on a daily basis.
Increase Mobile Organic Ranking
Even sites with high authority can have a poor Baidu mobile ranking performance if their sites are not mobile-friendly. While a mobile-friendly website doesn’t guarantee mobile traffic, it will at least get you in the game and provide a much better experience.
Building Good Quality Backlinks for Baidu SEO
Some may still believe that the way to get ahead in Baidu is to engage in low-quality link spam techniques, or Black Hat SEO, but we strongly believe that the best long-term strategy will always be White Hat, high-quality link building.
Creating Great Content
We believe the most effective way of white hat link building is by creating great content that is
- Audience-focused
- Unique
- Entertaining
- Well-designed
- Formatted
Link Outreach
Creating quality content is only half of the game. Unless your website is already receiving a large amount of traffic, just publishing a piece of quality content and waiting for links to come in won’t work. In order to maximize the effectiveness of created content, successful link builders will need to identify KOLs, influencers and websites that may be interested in your content. Start by reaching out to them, form a relationship, and influence them to link your content to theirs. This process is known as link outreach.