Baidu is China’s primary search engine & the 6th largest search engine in the world.

Marketers with target audiences in China should focus on how to optimize their pages for their search engine rankings, as Google & other search engines have a minimal marketshare (<78%).

They offer a webmaster tools section which can offer valuable insights into how your site is performing there. 

Optimizing Your Website For Baidu Search Engine Rankings

Baidu Webmaster Tools will give webmasters suggestions for how to best optimize their websites for Baidu search.

However, there are still some common optimizations that can be done in the meantime to ensure that your site ranks well on Baidu.

Firstly, you’ll want to have a solid translation of your website content that is intended to be for audiences in China.

Do your research on where in China you will be competing & offer translations accordingly in either simplified or traditional Chinese.

Always ensure that your HREF-LANG tags are implemented properly on this content in the event that Google also comes across it.

Content should be placed in order of importance on a page, in order to ensure that there are no crawl budget issues during indexation.

Also, Meta Descriptions are held in higher regard by Baidu than Google, making it essential to optimize them well with keywords (Google does not use them as a ranking signal).

Aside from this, many of the common optimizations such as having fast page load speed, clear directives, a strong backlink profile & properly tagged images and rich assets are important.

Considerations To Take When Optimizing Content For Baidu Search

Webmasters & marketers should always thoroughly research their target audience, as well as their content subject before publishing content online.

In the case of Baidu, remember that there are strict regulations in China on what type of content can be consumed.

Failing to abide by these censorship rules will result in your content not being ranked, thereby wasting all efforts to make it.

Check the rules set forth by Chinese regulators to be sure that any content you may be about to post abides by their rules, as well as the rules for any other countries that you may be targeting in Baidu search.

Some places recommend using local hosting, however there are not straightforward ways to go about doing this, making a CDN the best option for quick access from local Baidu users.