With the recession hitting many western economies, the smart businesses are looking to increase their profits by breaking into markets like China,
The second biggest economy in the world. A great way for a business to create a share of this market place, and perhaps “test the water”, is to utilise the huge internet and social media platforms in the country, and that means SEO Chinese style. You can then sell your products or services into China and see what kind of response you get. You may be able to run your Chinese arm from where you are trading right now.
How amazing would that be? by Daniel Vassiliou, CEO of Endurance Seo
The Chinese use a search engine called Baidu. Google has some presence, and is growing slowly, but Baidu is the engine of choice with some 500,000,000 users. That is more than the entire population of the USA! 25% of the world’s social media Chinese based and on Chinese platforms, like Sina Weibo, a twitter/Facebook hybrid. Here are some interesting things to know about internet marketing in China.
Baidu is probably about 5 – 10 years behind where Google is. Back linking and meta data, are still very important to ranking a site. Payment for advertising, akin to Pay Per Click on Google, is a very solid way to guarantee position and exposure. This means that a two pronged approach to organic rankings and paid are imperative. There are no useful analytics for Baidu yet, and this is one of the things that is helping Google to grow into this market slowly. You can still use Google analytics in China to help gauge popularity and competition for certain keywords and search terms. Link building can be more general than on Google for Baidu SEO. Niche relation has an advantage, but there is more scope to gain links from a lot more platforms than you would dare do on Google. Links, and link amounts, still really matter as a way of judging a sites authority.
There are literally hundreds of billions of Chinese using social media networks, some estimates are over 600,000,000. The Chinese people are already used to ordering products online and through social media promotions. These platforms allow for a great deal of exposure and “buzz” to be created, similar to social media throughout the world. There is a much more voracious appetite within the Chinese consumer though.
Baidu
Many Chinese provinces and cities do not have a lot of shops to buy from, or places to gain services like investment products or holiday packages. They do though have money, a lot of it much of the time, and are used to buying online because that is the only place they can get access to products. You can focus campaigns on Baidu, similarly to Google, to pick out the particular locations you wish to target. By investigating which locations are prospering, and without a lot of, “consumer infrastructure”, you can carry out very effective online campaigns from where your business is currently located. There are efficient payment facilities similar to Paypal, like Alipay that can be utilised to get paid. Paypal has a small footprint within China at the moment so is not worth using.
Websites need to be in Mandarin, and designed to suit the Chinese consumer. There are differences to online shopping habits between the Chinese customer, and any other in the world. The site needs to flow to suit their needs, and be in their language. An experienced Chinese Marketing agency will be able to help any global business, develop a site that is going to be your outpost to the Chinese buyers.
China is rapidly becoming the largest online consumer country in the world. Global businesses, however big or small, have the opportunity to utilise the S.E.O and online marketing expertise they have had for nearly two decades now, to make great in roads to this economical powerhouse. Whether the long term plan is to set up physically in China or not, there are literally millions of consumers looking to buy what you are selling, online somewhere over there. Are you really prepared to let your competition satisfy their needs?
Daniel Vassiliou is CEO of Endurance Seo
Twitter. https://twitter.com/enduranceseo
Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Endurance-Seo/348798158544017
I haven’t actually read anything about this before. I think its kind of odd how quiet the web marketing crowd is about using China as a customer base instead of somewhere to buy some cheap labor. It makes me wonder if Baidu is even prepared to deal with all the classic Black Hat techniques that Google has already nullified in the past. They might want to be careful if this catches on.
What would be regarded as black hat on Google is not seen quite that way on Baidu. We are really trying to push the fact that a business can enter the vast markets of India and China, in the case of this post, from where they are based, and start to grow their brand and market share. Very exciting proposition for many global companies looking to secure “real growth” for the coming years.