As we have mentioned in one of our previous posts on Chinese search engines, it is particularly difficult for sites to rank on the first page since sponsored ads and Baidu’s own product pages often appear before any organic result.
This special rule of baidu seo is actually pretty useful when your page is not currently indexed or ranked well, or your Chinese site is just not ready yet. You can try to create your business’ Baidu Baike page (Baidu’s own version of Wikipedia) and put everything you want your audience to know about it there.
If your content gets past the verification stage, this “ad space” is guaranteed to be ranked on the first page whenever people search your company name on Baidu, even if the official website itself does not get indexed at all!
While Google ranks web pages primarily by relevance, Baidu allocates extra weight to a website’s home page rather than any of its internal pages. For this reason, sites ranked on the first page of Baidu search results are normally the main page of a site.
Businesses aware of this should put home page design and content as their top priority when trying to rank for relevant keywords on Baidu.
The implementation of NLP (Natural Language Processing) on Baidu still lags behind, which is also a key difference of Chinese SEO that you should keep in mind.
Here we did an experiment testing the result from searching “How to do digital marketing” on Baidu and Google separately. And the search result differs from each other a lot. Baidu still prioritizes sites with the exact search keyword in the page title while Google ranks them based on the actual content.
As much as being the flaw of the search algorithm itself, this reflects a golden rule for China SEO players to pay extra attention to. Incorporating the exact keywords you want to rank for the most into your page title is very important, but remember to keep it concise! (We will talk more about why in a bit.)