Compared with western search engines, Baidu SEO is very unique and hard. When doing SEO for Baidu, keyword research should be done for Baidu as well.
Chinese people will have different search preference than people in other countries. In this article, we outline key approach on Baidu SEO keyword filtering to help business better understand China SEO marketing.
Initial Filtering
- Identify one to three keywords that can best summarize the theme or services of your China website. For example, the possible keywords for a website that provides real estate agent services could be Sydney Real Estate （悉尼置业） or Real Estate Agent (海外置业服务).
- List synonyms of the selected keywords as appropriate for your services or products. If the theme of a website is Travel, for example, its synonyms could be Tourism, Independent Traveller and Self-Guided Tour.
- Identify keywords in the upper-level category of the products or services provided by your website. Upper-level keywords are not always available for every website, but it is a good way to explore keywords for most of the website. (You may visit relevant sites or forum of the industry and see what keywords are used by users talking about similar topics).
- List all keywords relevant to all products, brands or services available on the website.
- Discover potential needs and relevant keywords when users are browsing your website. When users are browsing an outbound travelling website, for example, there is often a need for currency exchange rates.
- Find out as many long tail keywords relevant to the aforesaid keywords as possible.
- Think about what keywords Chinese search engine users are likely to use for searching your website. That is, identify keywords in search habits of target audience.
Filtering
Many keywords are generated by initial filtering and it is impossible to reflect them all on the website. It is necessary to choose those with Baidu SEO value.
- Make sure the selected keywords have search traffic. Users are actually using those keywords and search traffic is large enough. You may refer to Baidu index to better understanding the search volume of the keywords.
- Make sure the website can produce content relevant to those keywords. After entering your website via keyword search, users may go on clicking Read, Register and Buy, among other behaviors. This is conversion rate, a highly important indicator for search engines.
- The complexity of content production should be controllable. Among the needs of outbound travellers mentioned above, for example, the need for currency exchange rates is easy to meet, but for small websites, many specific needs are difficult to satisfy.
Important Notes on Baidu SEO Keyword Filtering
- Those keywords and the website should fall under the same sector. On a health theme website, for example, it is appropriate to have some content of medical science, but entertainment news is obviously inappropriate.
- Select more effective keywords. Some websites follow those buzz words recommended on Baidu homepage closely and fill their websites with related information. Those buzz words, however, are often irrelevant to their products and services. In this way, it is possible to capture some traffic, but is unable to achieve conversion. This practice does no good to their websites. Moreover, the sites tend to be excluded by search engines as junk content.
- Don’t overestimate the importance of general keywords. In initial filtering, we look for keywords in the upper-level category of the services or products available on the sites. But when picking up keywords, never rely on general keywords overly at the stage of initial filtering. It is advisable that the sites highlight several topics and enrich content in those respects.
- Attach importance to long tail keywords. We suggested finding out some long tail keywords in item 6 under initial filtering, but the search traffic related to long tail keywords is usually much smaller than that of general keywords or non-long-tail keywords. Some websites consider them useless and give up on them. As a matter of fact, long tail keywords contain more accurate user information and provide better conversion and less Baidu SEO competition, and therefore, are worth more efforts of online digital marketer.
For companies looking at marketing in China to tap into the Chinese market, it’s important that they come to understand Chinese search engines as well as China SEO rules. A localised SEO approach will help company to build up brand awareness and drive sales in the local market.
