Now, you’re trying to figure out how to get more organic traffic from China too, right?
This post is for people experienced in Google SEO who want to get straight to the point on what to do for Baidu SEO.
If you know very little about SEO, this may be a little saudi arabia number advanced for you, so it might be worth starting with Baidu SEO Basics instead.
For those of you who are seasoned Google SEOers, let’s start with a bit about Baidu first.
Table of Contents
Understanding Baidu
Baidu is like Google in many ways
Where Should Baidu Sit in Your Overall Marketing Strategy?
Baidu SEO Checklist
1 – Be extra careful to avoid Javascript to display content
2 – Use Chinese-language content
3 – Set up your hosting and domain
4 – Use HTTPS
5 – Use the Baidu “Ziyuan” tool to monitor for problems and submit webpages
6 – Post fresh content
7 – (Maybe) Learn More
Understanding Baidu
Baidu is like Google in many ways
Good news. Your background in Google SEO means you’re well on the way to understanding Baidu SEO.
Baidu, like Google, also wants to serve useful and relevant content to its users.
Baidu is focused on CHINA
Baidu doesn’t focus on users other than Chinese-speaking users from China.
Therefore, for starters, you’ll need to use Chinese-language content on your website.
Baidu is selfish
Well, although Baidu cares about its users…it doesn’t care quite as much as Google does. Baidu pushes many of its own properties into the top search results, making it more difficult for other players to gain organic search traffic.
Baidu is not as good at assessing newer, smaller websites
If you have a smallish website (under 50 pages, for example) on a niche and even have great content, Baidu may still be slow to index your site and give you decent organic rankings.
Where Should Baidu Sit in Your Overall Marketing Strategy?
I’m not a focused SEOer. Instead, I run teams that do search ads, content marketing, social, SEO, video marketing, etc.
If you’re trying to do holistic digital marketing, there’s a 90% chance Baidu SEO should make up a lower proportion of your marketing mix than Google SEO does in the rest of the world (RoW). For example, in NMG, one of the many platforms we use to get a head start on organic search is Zhihu.
The exception is if you aren’t really doing any marketing in China, but simply want to pick up on Baidu organic search traffic for free. By “free,” we mean you will make some changes to your SEO to scoop up more traffic from Baidu. This can work, especially for big sites with many pages.
Baidu SEO Checklist
Before I list these, remember that this is not a comprehensive list of ALL the SEO you need to do. It’s merely a list of things to do if you already have mastered Google SEO and now want to take on Baidu.
1 – Be extra careful to avoid Javascript to display content
Your website needs to show content to users in HTML and CSS. Even if Google is indexing some Javascript content, that doesn’t mean Baidu will.
2 – Use Chinese-language content
You need to get your hands on as much Chinese content as possible. That’s really what Baidu wants to index.
Ideally, you’ll have all pages in Chinese, but I realize that isn’t always feasible.
Baidu will still index some English content, but only for websites it thinks are useful for Chinese us