How to do SEO for Baidu: Complete Guide to Baidu SEO

Expanding your business in China through digital platforms is an excellent opportunity to take advantage of the country’s ever-growing economy. However, as the world’s largest Chinese search engine, Baidu SEO has different rules and guidelines that you need to follow to be visible on their platform.

Baidu is China's largest search engine with over 72% of the market share. It is the highly preferred search engine for Chinese netizens and processes an average of 6 billion searches per day. Baidu has over 218 million active daily users, which makes it essential for companies that want to enter the Chinese market to optimize their website according to Baidu SEO standards.

This guide will show you how to do just that. But first, let's take a look at Baidu's humble beginnings.

History of Baidu

In January 2000, Baidu was founded by Robin Li and Eric Xu. It is the earliest and leading search engine in China. Baidu's mission is to make it easy for people to find information.

Baidu was originally just a search engine for large websites such as Sina or Sohu, but in 2001, Robin Li decided to start his own search engine geared toward the general public.

Three years and 25 million dollars after, Baidu was finally on the profitability threshold. During this time, investors advised Li to sell the company to other major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. However, Li convinced them to make an IPO in the Nasdaq of New York instead.

On August 5, 2005, Baidu shares went from 27 dollars to 122 dollars. This raised the value of the company to more than 4 billion dollars.

Today, with a market cap of $46.30 Billion Dollars, Baidu continues to be one of the most powerful companies not only in China but also worldwide.

To understand Baidu SEO, you need to have a clear understanding of the Chinese search market. The Chinese search engine market is different from the Western one in many ways.

In 2021, China makes up for more than one-fifth of the four billion internet users worldwide. This gives China the largest online community in the world. And this number continues to grow as more and more people gain access to the internet.

As you can see, Baidu holds the vast majority of the search engine market in China. This is why optimizing your website for Baidu should be your number one priority if you want to enter the Chinese digital market.

The Chinese search engine market differs from the Western one not only because of its size but also on how consumers use search engines.

One of the main differences is that in China, people use search engines to find all kinds of information, including product reviews, images, videos, news, and much more. Whereas in the West, people use search engines mostly to find websites.

Another distinction is that Chinese people are far more trusting of what they find on search engines. This is due to the fact that, in China, global search engines such as Google or Bing are inaccessible. So, the Chinese have grown to trust the results they see on Baidu.

This trust has led to different user behavior when it comes to search engines. In China, people are more likely to click on the first result they see on Baidu than in the West. Whereas in the West, people tend to scroll through the first page of results and click on the one they find most relevant.

This difference in user behavior has a significant impact on how companies should optimize their website for Baidu.

Now that we've learned about the history of Baidu and the Chinese search market, it's time to dive into Baidu SEO.

Baidu SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on Baidu's search engine results pages (SERPs).

This may sound similar to how you would optimize your website for Google, but there are notable differences between the two search engines that you should be aware of.

First, Baidu offers more search results per page as compared to Google. Whereas Google shows 10 results per page, Baidu shows up to 30. This may not seem like a big difference, but it's actually crucial when it comes to optimization.

Second, as we mentioned before, Chinese users trust what they find on Baidu and are will tend to click on the first result they see. This means that being the first result on Baidu's SERPs is even more important than being the first on Google's.

Lastly, Baidu puts more emphasis on the content of your website than on backlinks. In other words, having high-quality content is essential if you want to rank well on Baidu.