Baidu is renowned for integrating its products onto the main search engine. This integration is deemed to be a win-win as it favors both user and business. However, it also poses a unique challenge for SEO campaigns targeting keywords on Baidu.
Here’s an in-depth look into some of Baidu’s properties and how they impact SEO strategies.
Baidu News
With access to 1,000+ news sources, Baidu News is China’s premier news aggregation platform. It’s often compared to Google News; though, Baidu is solely reliant on external content creators. Once the platform aggregates fresh content, it links these articles to the publisher’s website. This creates a tremendous amount of traffic for those publishers. With this in mind, it’s important to note Baidu has a rigorous qualification process before a news source is considered acceptable. In fact, several foreign sites fail to pass under these stringent criteria! To apply for Baidu News, it has to be done via Baidu Webmaster Tools.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
All verified news sources have their content aggregated by Baidu News. Once this occurs, fresh articles are directly linked alongside organic search results. This leads to targeted, organic traffic around the clock, once the source is deemed appropriate and authentic. If possible, it’s best to qualify as a verified source as soon as possible.
Baidu Maps
Baidu Maps is China’s premier online map service. This is not a worldwide map and only covers specific regions in Asia including Mainland China, Macau, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Singapore. While Baidu Maps may not offer the same features Google Maps does, its maps are accurate and reliable, which puts it on top in China.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
Anytime a local business is typed into Baidu, a direct connection is made to Baidu Maps snippets. This means improved local SEO as long as the listings are kept up-to-date. It’s important to manage your Baidu Maps profile and ensure it’s in good shape to help generate traffic.
Baidu Images
Similar to Google images, Baidu Images is designed to offer a robust index of web images from relevant Chinese websites. While Google emphasizes worldwide content, Baidu is solely focused on Chinese-related images and only indexes Chinese content. Even with this restriction, it can produce tremendous search results for various Chinese keywords and/or topics.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
Baidu Images is a wonderful source for organic, targeted traffic. This index can easily link to third-party websites providing a unique opportunity to rank higher and bring in new leads. Each image is linked to a website, which ensures organic traffic goes straight to your webpages. These images are easy to rank and can make a noticeable difference to your SEO campaign when managed wisely.
Baidu Tieba
Baidu Tieba is an all-encompassing network of niche forums/communities. In essence, Tieba is designed to host various niches/communities under one platform. Baidu maintains all of these forums on its servers. To leverage this extraordinarily powerful resource, Baidu integrates its forums and/or communities directly into Baidu’s search engine. From the largest niches to some of the smallest, Tieba has a discussion forum for everything and its readily available to use, share, and enjoy.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
Tieba is an essential platform for SEO campaigns. It’s a well-leveraged site and is fully integrated into Baidu’s search algorithm. Therefore, leveraging Tieba’s communities as a way to rank your content can help push to the top of search results faster than ever before. Plus, it puts your content in front of a targeted audience too.
Baidu Wenku
Noted as the largest online document-sharing platform in China, Baidu Wenku offers a comprehensive collection of educational materials, business documents, novels, research papers, comics, and legal documents. Its western comparable would be Slideshare, however, Wenku is well regarded for providing a larger selection of file formats.
Its core principle is built on the shoulders of an integrated credit system. In this system, users are supposed to download documents using their credits. These credits can be earned in one of two ways. You can either purchase them from Baidu or earn credits by uploading fresh content straight to the platform. Over time, Baidu Wenku has been upgraded and improved allowing self-published pieces to be uploaded as well. This allows authors to create personal content and use Wenku as a launching pad for promotions and/or sales.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
SEO campaigns can easily leverage the ranking power of Baidu Wenku. In general, the average customer wants as much information as possible about a product/service. With this in mind, they are often seen using Wenku as a resource while doing their research. Being on this platform is a wonderful way to spread the word and gain credibility at the same time.
Baidu Baike
Baike is a comprehensive online encyclopedia and is a direct comparison to Wikipedia. Its main purpose is to offer accessible and accurate information on almost every topic under the sun. This information is kept unbiased, well integrated, and up-to-date without interruption. As of 2019, there are approximately 16+ million articles on Baike and this number continues to grow. Its role in the average Chinese classroom cannot be understated, as it’s quickly become a major resource from east to west.
The differences between Baike and Wikipedia are seen in the monetization model. Wikipedia is marketed as a “free” online encyclopedia while Baike isn’t. Instead, Baike is heralded as one of the more commercial-centric platforms in the world. To manage a business page, companies need to pay a set fee, which means Baike doesn’t follow Wikipedia’s non-profitable approach.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
With increased control for businesses on Baike, It’s a wonderful opportunity to build a positive brand image using this frequented platform. It’s already regarded as one of the most reliable websites in China and can be leveraged to help push your brand to the top of its niche.
Baidu Zhidao
Baidu Zhidao is China’s Yahoo Answers and is designed to act as a robust Q&A platform. Whether it’s a simple or complex question, Zhidao provides an assortment of answers on its site. This platform is equipped with millions of questions and answers providing a peek into the importance of Zhidao.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
Zhidao is an impactful resource when it comes to SEO campaigns. You can generate targeted leads using traffic from this all-inclusive Q&A platform. Zhidao may not provide direct traffic via linked webpages; but it does offer a fascinating platform to spread awareness about your brand and its vision. The answers offer insight into what the business stands for and why it’s the ultimate option in all of China. Among Chinese marketing professionals, Zhidao remains a powerful and successful strategy for generating new leads.
Baidu Open
Baidu Open is a specialized platform designed for developers. When used wisely, this can become a launching pad for SERP widgets with structured data. Instead of relying on schema.org and “rich snippets,” Baidu prefers the use of Open for all widget creations. If not Open, sites can also make use of Baidu Webmaster Tools or hope for an automated solution where you’re ranked without doing anything. According to research, a certain collection of rich snippets formats can be used with Baidu Webmaster Tools. However, Baidu ensures everything works seamlessly once put into place.
How does it Impact SEO on Baidu?
SEO is all about structure and it starts with the use of structured data. Baidu Open provides developers with the ability to play around with different widgets to improve their chances of ranking.
Supplementary Baidu Products
Along with these commonly named Baidu properties, it’s also important to consider some of the supplementary products under this brand.
Baidu Jingyan
Jingyan or “experience” refers to informational answers provided by experts. These answers are completed in a comprehensive step-by-step format.
Baidu Nuomi
This product is a robust group buying service. A variety of Chinese-based products can be listed on Nuomi for group purchases.
Baidu Lvyou
Lvyou is a detailed travel guide with built-in reviews. This Baidu product also offers rich snippets for all travel-based search queries.
Baidu Mall
This service aims to compile up-to-date information from China’s largest e-commerce sites under one banner. Baidu Mall is designed to directly target the e-commerce setup in China. This Baidu product comes with a number of predecessors including the likes of Temai, Hui, and Weigou. However, Baidu has been dealing with strict competition including the likes of Taobao, JD.com and Alibaba’s Tmall.
