How to rank on Baidu in four easy steps

Here at Econsultancy, we’ve covered the search engine Baidu on our blog before through one of our guest bloggers Eddie Choi.

With around 600 million internet users and an economy that despite the slowdown continues to strengthen, China represents a huge potential market for companies willing to invest there.

However, there are differences in best practice between search marketing in China and for the rest of the world. To cover that, we’ve just launched the Baidu Search Best Practice Guide in association with China Search International.

As a preview, here are four tips to whet your appetite…

Develop local insights and strategies

China is a massive country, and although it might look homogenous to outsiders, this is far from the case.

With more than a billion people spread out over an area nearly 40 times the size of the UK, China is an incredibly diverse market.

Different regions in China have different government policies, economic situations, weather, culture and use of language. Therefore it is essential to have local knowledge with a deep understanding of local customer needs.

One faux pas made by many companies is to simply translate keyword lists in English (on Google) into Mandarin and expect success. This is far from the case.

Know how you will measure success

As with any other marketing campaign, it is essential that you get the basics right with Baidu by establishing the right goals, KPIs and metrics.

Without this, it will be impossible to measure return on investment and work out whether the efforts put into any search strategy have been effective.

For companies looking to get started on Baidu, they should make sure they have this part tightly defined before they invest heavily into this market.

Ensure you track the right metrics

In addition to setting KPIs, it is important to make sure that the appropriate technology is in place to ascertain whether certain KPIs and goals have been met.

Whether you choose to use Baidu’s analytics (Baidu Tongji) or another tool depends on your requirements, but either way you should make sure that the appropriate configurations have been made.

Get your Baidu keyword strategy right

As Eddie Choi summed up in his blog post on the search behaviour of Chinese internet users, it differs from that of other countries. As such, your keyword strategy should be locally tuned.

Out of the tools recommended in the report, two include:

Baidu Popular Search Ranking 搜索风云榜 (top.baidu.com) – provides the ranking of popular search items on Baidu.
Baidu Data Research 数据研究 (data.baidu.com) – provides industry-specific reports of in-depth consumer insights, search behaviour and more.

Have you got any tips you would like to share?

Has your company had any successes or failures on Baidu? What would you recommend for companies looking to use the platform? Have we missed anything out?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below!