Baidu is by far the most popular search engine in China.  It has a market share of 71.9 percent as of 2021. In comparison, only 4% of online searches in China are conducted through Google.
Improving your website’s position on Baidu necessitates a slightly different approach to SEO than you would be used to with Google. The objective with this series is to better acquaint ourselves with this new approach.
Let’s start with…

What Is SEO? Is It Still Relevant Today?
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is a technology that analyses Search Engine rankings, in order to understand how engines, like Baidu, perform searches. This also includes an understanding of how they crawl Internet pages, and how they rank search results for specific keywords.
SEO carries on the targeted optimization of your website, improves the natural ranking of your website in the search engine, attracts more users to visit your website thus improving the page view & boosts sales. So, make sure that your website is easy to be searched and quoted.

Your Website Is Baidu’s Foundation!
To lure Chinese millennials, many enterprises have launched online storefronts and eCommerce websites. In the digital age, having a website is essential because it is frequently the first stop for your customers. You can’t perform SEO if you don’t have a website. And, if you can’t do SEO, you will be barely visible to potential Chinese customers.
Having your website hosted in China is a significant boost for its loading speed and improving website authority, but a neighbouring nation can suffice.

Domain Affinity – Baidu

Baidu prefers sites that are hosted on Chinese servers; .CN domain suffix (China’s country code) over .com in ranking its search results. Move your website to a Chinese server if it is simple to do so. Please do not use a shared hosting service. It’s a smart idea to upgrade to a dedicated or virtual private server no matter where you are, but it’s more important when trying to get Baidu’s attention.

Other Specifications & Must Haves – Baidu SEO

The “Business License” and the “Content Provider License” (ICP) are the two most important licences. ICP can be obtained from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and will allow you to create a localhost website with a “.cn” domain name.

You will be penalised if you spread your website across multiple domains or create a subdomain for blogging (or any other online asset). Everything done through a top-level domain (TLD) is preferred by Baidu.

You should be aware that Baidu takes into account the Communist Party’s political and legal restrictions. Before releasing something, it is critical to check the news.

Because the Google ban only applies to mainland China, there is no need to target Internet users in Taiwan, Macau, or Hong Kong with Baidu because they mostly use Yahoo or Google.

In the next installment of this series, we will be looking at optimization and how to significantly improve your brand’s Baidu ranking.