If you want to successfully use digital marketing in China, you must become intimately familiar with Baidu: the leading Chinese international search engine. Baidu commands 68.5% of the search market in China, with its next largest competitor, known as ‘360 Search,’ falling far behind at 14.2%.

Baidu itself is a tech company that moved in on search early. It adopted many of its initial ideas from Google, but quickly began to differentiate itself. It focuses solely on the Chinese language, which has given it space to nurture its understanding of Simplified Chinese. It grew in popularity because of its superior ability to understand Chinese text and thus deliver quality results for Chinese users.

Baidu has several web properties outside of the search engine. It offers services, such as travel sites, music platforms, translation services, and much more to its users, with these web properties often prominently featured on the search results pages. Baidu is investing heavily in AI and autonomous cars.

If you want to learn more about how to succeed with SEO for Baidu and expand your business into China, here is what you might find similar and different when venturing onto the Chinese search engine.

What will look familiar with SEO for Baidu

When you first started learning about SEO in the West, you likely explored features, such as the site meta data, the architecture of the site, and understanding canonical URLs. These features should also be used for content and SEO for Baidu.

Keep in mind, however, that while they might look similar, the search engine likely weighs them differently. For example, although Google only uses meta descriptions on the SERP and they do not directly impact rankings, SEO for Baidu does consider the content in the meta description.

Mobile should also play a prominent role in your SEO for Baidu. Google, and the other major western search engines, have placed a larger emphasis on mobile devices in recent years, particularly with the introduction of the mobile-first algorithm. In China, however, mobile devices have dominated the scene for a while. This means mobile optimization has been built into the algorithm. The Chinese search giant even has its own version of AMP, known as MIP or mobile instant pages.

Similarly, Baidu also places a large emphasis on rooting out duplicate content and may punish it even more harshly than Google. Western SEOs should already know the importance of creating original, valuable content for users, but when performing SEO for Baidu it needs to take even a higher precedent.

Baidu also announced a few years ago that they would include HTTPS as a ranking signal, and professionals have noticed a greater security emphasis on SEO for Baidu results since about 2016. Setting up any Chinese sites as HTTPS should therefore be a priority.

Finally, SEO for Baidu used to have a reputation for not being as good as Google in its ability to understand links, but this has changed over the past few years. They have improved their ability to understand the links pointing to your site, so do not neglect your link-cultivation strategies you use elsewhere.

Differences with SEO for Baidu

Once you get deeper into the idea of SEO for Baidu, you will find that the Chinese search engine differentiates itself in many ways. In addition to these similarities, there are also a number of differences that SEOs must consider.

Censorship

At the forefront, you need to keep the Chinese state-censorship in mind. Anyone running a business out of China, including running a Chinese site, needs to make sure they familiarize themselves with the laws and regulations pertaining to their business and content they distribute. Verify that your website does not contain anything that might trigger the communication regulations.

Chinese emphasis

Remember also that this search engine has been built specifically for people in China. This means that they deal only with content written in Chinese. You want to work with a native speaker whenever possible for translation. Baidu’s webmasters tools are not available in English and Baidu places a big emphasis on the quality of the content. Poor translations of material will receive a flag as poor-quality content. Note that Baidu also prefers Simplified Chinese script over Traditional.

When you implement SEO for Baidu, remember that Baidu will have a strong bias towards anything Chinese. This means that site owners need to pay attention to all elements of their site and opt for a Chinese version when possible. This includes:

• The site domain
• The business address on the site
• The server location
• The citations
• The links for the site

Baidu does have good reasons for this preference. Although Baidu dominates within China itself, that is also the main source of its traffic. The search engine knows that the vast majority of its customers come from mainland China. Focusing SEO for Baidu on businesses that invest in serving the Chinese population will provide its users with a better experience.

Differences in the SERP appearance

The Baidu SERP also contains some differences that separate it from Google. One of the first things new users will notice is the prominence of images. Nearly every search will contain some images and most organic results will have thumbnails with them. Brands need to therefore pay close attention to the images they include on their sites.

Baidu also prominently features its own properties on the snippets and ads on the SERP to a degree that would seem excessive to most in the West. It can also be even harder to distinguish between paid and organic results on Baidu compared to Google.

SEO success on a global scale requires understanding local search engines and needs. Although many countries also use Google to a large degree, China differentiates itself through its popular and prominent Baidu. Brands that want to build their Chinese audience will need to understand how to optimize their material for this platform. Consider how you can start to employ some of these strategies and tips moving forward to prepare your site for Chinese SEO.

Baidu, China’s largest search engine, is positioning itself to become a juggernaut in mobile search. Last year, mobile Internet users in China overtook PC-based, and now 50% of revenue comes from Baidu mobile. Building on this financial base, Baidu is investing heavily in the development of Baidu mobile search technology which could have applications in markets far beyond China’s borders.

Coming relatively late to the digital revolution, China is leap-frogging many older industrial nations in its adoption of the latest technology. Today, 23% of the world’s 2.8 billion Internet users live in China, and more and more they are accessing the Internet through mobile devices. In 2014 China counted 1.3 billion mobile subscriptions, including 513 million smartphone registrations, which grew by 21% last year.

Baidu management has taken due notice. Robin Li, founder of the firm (and one of China’s richest men) has firmly set Baidu on the mobile path:

"Baidu is redefining the search box by building an ecosystem to connect people with services and drive closed-loop transactions. Baidu's platform is comprehensive and robust, and we plan to fully exploit the huge growth potential ahead … by leveraging our Baidu mobile foundation, exceptional technology advantage, and proven operational experience."

Amplifying on this statement, a Baidu spokesperson said, “We’re definitely a mobile company first now and everything we do begins with mobile and takes priority over our PC products.”

Currently this mobile strategy seems to have two components – investing heavily in mobile-related technology while penetrating key mobile-first markets like Brazil and Indonesia.

Investing in mobile technology

Baidu has invested millions of dollars in technology companies, making a strategic investment in Taboola in May of this year. Taboola generates content recommendations that appear at the end of articles, a technology that could be used to build a knowledge graph for Baidu. (Interestingly, Taboola is the third Israeli tech company Baidu has invested in recently.)

But even more important is Baidu’s investment in artificial intelligence.

In May of 2014, Stanford Computer Science professor Andrew Ng joined to become Chief Scientist at Baidu Research, with labs in Silicon Valley and Beijing. Professor Ng is the co-founder of Coursera, the online education platform. But he may be best-known for a deep learning AI project that he ran with Google, wherein they built a network of neural processors that watched thousands of hours of unlabeled Youtube videos. Entirely on its own, without any human direction, the neural network learned how to identify … cats (it was YouTube after all).

By continuing to improve this deep learning technology, Baidu will leap ahead in its ability to analyze speech data and written language in Chinese, English, and any other language. And Baidu is already planning an enhanced supercomputer for 2016 that will greatly improve its capabilities in object recognition.

What are the search implications of this technology?

We need look no further than a new Baidu project called Baidu Eye. Working in tandem with your smartphone, Baidu Eye is designed to enable you to identify a product you see and instantly provide pricing information, so that you can purchase it on the spot if you wish.

Professor Ng has been careful to describe Baidu Eye as a “research exploration” not a product, but it fits neatly into Baidu’s vision of the future. Ng predicts that “Within five years, 50% of our queries will be through speech and images" not just text.

In other words, the picture becomes the query. And image search becomes the key to massive profits in sophisticated markets as well as markets where a high percentage of the population is barely literate.

Opportunities far beyond the Great Firewall

Today more than 93% of Baidu’s visitors are in China, but Robin Li and his management team are looking far beyond the nation’s borders. In 2014 Baidu started operations in Brazil, a mobile-first country where Ng’s new technologies may deliver a decisive advantage.

Baidu has also moved aggressively into Indonesia, another mobile-first market. In Indonesia, Baidu is not starting with a search engine, rather it is importing Android apps from China that have proven to be quite popular locally. And Baidu is also running pilot projects in Thailand and Egypt.

So here’s the formula – create the world’s best mobile technology for processing speech and images, and deploy it in markets where mobile is dominant. Only time will tell if Baidu is on the right path, but this certainly appears to be a bold leap into the future for China’s leading search engine.