Thinking About Your Baidu Keyword Strategy

Why are you doing Baidu SEO? What is your ultimate business goal? Because SEO is a tricky subject. The common misconception about SEO is that it is about ranking high for certain keywords.

This for the most part is true but which keywords? Because not all keywords will have equal value for your businesses. Some keywords will yield more business results, while other will be better for brand exposure or simply useless.

In this chapter we’ll talk about the 7 steps of creating a solid Baidu keywords strategy.

Step 1: Understand the Searcher’s Intent

Let me ask you a quick question…

What’s the difference between these 3 search keywords?

1) “what age should my daughter learn English”
2) “how to prepare my kids for the future?”
3) “best kid’s English tutoring in Shanghai”,

If you guess the searcher’s intent is different behind each of these keywords then you’re right. While the intent behind all of these search query or keywords are to find the best solution to improve their kid’s education and future but each keyword represents a different phase of the customer’s decision-making cycle.

When the searcher types “how to prepare my kids for the future?” this searcher is trying to figure out what are the best solution to best prepare their kids for success in the future.

This indicates that this search is very early in the buying cycle and he or she is only aware of problems and not yet aware of a good solution to solve their problems.

“what age should my daughter learn English”, this searcher is aware of the solution to their problem. They are still early in the buyer’s cycle and seeking for more specific information on the solution.

On the other hand, the keywords “best kid’s English tutoring in Shanghai” indicates that this searcher is well aware of their solution and are now looking for the best service providers of the solution to compare with.

Most businesses wants to rank for high buying intent keywords as it has the most commercial value. The problem with this keyword strategy of only going for high buying intent keywords (low hanging fruits) is that they’re often highly competitive, hard and sometime impossible to rank for.

But if you take a step back and prepare a slightly different strategy to go after the keywords that is one step before these keywords are much easier to rank for and will usually have a much higher search volume.

They key is to have a good balance and a good mixture of different keywords.

Step 2: Brainstorm Your Seed List of Keywords

Come up with a listed of seed keywords based on your ideal customers and their different intent stages. Ask yourself, what are some of the keywords my ideal customer will search for and what’s the intention behind their search?

Get your team and other people involved in the brainstorm process as they will usually have a different perspective than you and come up with keywords that you may have not thought of.

Step 3: Expand Your List with Keyword Research

The seed list of keywords will be your starting point and it is a great start. However, there are probably a lot of keywords that you and your team will not know.

This is where you would want to take your initial list of seed keywords and expand that list using keyword research and variety available tools such as Baidu Webmaster Tools, Baidu Index or Baidu Keyword Planner.

Step 4: Group Your Keywords

Take you’re huge listed of keyword and s