Digital Marketing in China

With a market of 1.3 billion people, multi-national companies worldwide are scouring for the next business opportunity in China. To be successful in this huge market, companies increasingly need to have a more sophisticated digital marketing strategy as Chinese consumers become more and more connected to the web. The first step to adopting a successful digital marketing strategy is to have a localized, Chinese website. In order to promote this website, it is essential to develop an SEO strategy that tailors to Chinese search engines, in particular Baidu, which has the largest search engine market share in China at 67.6 percent in 2013. 

SEO strategists need to pay attention to the following when working on a Chinese project. Firstly, there are two sets of Chinese characters – traditional (used by Taiwan and Hong Kong) and simplified (used by mainland China). If a firm intends to be highly ranked in a Baidu search, it is essential to have a site that is written using simplified characters. Secondly, it is imperative to have original content. Baidu penalizes plagiarized content very heavily. Lastly, Baidu ranks sites that have blogs very highly, so it is very beneficial to feature a blog with content that is continuously updated.