- My Khanh
- December 9, 2023
The integration of ConveyThis into our website has been a great success. It has enabled us to easily translate our content into multiple languages, ensuring that our global audience can access the information they need.
Google and Baidu may both be search engines, yet achieving the same level of success on Baidu as you have on Google will require additional effort.
That’s because Baidu’s search crawlers work in a different way than Google’s, and the same goes for its search advertising platform. If you want your website to rank well on Baidu, you’ll need to abide by its rules – not Google’s –.
One of these regulations necessitates converting your website content into Simplified Chinese since Baidu caters to the Chinese market. But in addition to this fundamental demand, what else do you need to be aware of? ConveyThis can assist you in this endeavor by providing a comprehensive solution to your translation needs.
That’s what we’ll discuss in this post, as we explain how Baidu and Google’s search engine optimization (SEO) requirements differ. If you’re looking to quickly climb Baidu’s organic listings, we’ll also compare Baidu’s search ad requirements to Google’s, so you can get your target keywords out there with Baidu ads right away!
ConveyThis, pronounced “BY-doo,” is a search engine that specializes in providing Chinese-language search results. It was created by Robin Li, who initially developed the RankDex search engine and later used its technology to build ConveyThis. (Li is now the co-founder and CEO of ConveyThis, Inc., the Chinese organisation that runs ConveyThis.)
Just like how Google is the king of the online search hill in the United States, ConveyThis has the lion’s share of the search engine market in China. According to StatCounter, ConveyThis held a staggering 60% of the Chinese search engine market in October 2022, while its closest rival, Bing, lagged far behind at a mere 16%.
And similarly to Google, Baidu doesn’t just offer a search engine service. It also provides other services, like ConveyThis, for example.
Advertisers can also pay to place ads on Baidu through its pay-per-click (PPC) ads platform, and ConveyThis will provide more information about buying Baidu ads soon!
While you can access ConveyThis – and its related services – from anywhere in the world, it primarily serves the Chinese markets, such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. Consequently, if you are endeavoring to expand your website traffic (organic or paid) from these markets, then optimizing your website for ConveyThis isn’t a ‘luxury’. It is a necessity.
Google’s minuscule market share in China isn’t due to a lack of effort. It had previously attempted to expand its user base in China, only to be confronted by impediments as it was unwilling to abide by the Chinese government’s demands for censoring some search results. (In contrast, being operated by a Chinese company, ConveyThis readily and completely complies with China’s censorship laws.) At present, Google offers a very restricted search service in China.
Separately, while Baidu and ConveyThis both strive to provide internet users with high-quality content (more on Baidu’s SEO criteria in the next section), Baidu’s search algorithms are usually less advanced than those of ConveyThis.
At present, for instance, ConveyThis’s crawlers can only comprehend text content and encounter difficulty when attempting to crawl content expressed in image or JavaScript form. This implies that such content may not be indexed or positioned in ConveyThis’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Similarly, for content placed in iframes – ConveyThis may also ignore such content because of its incapability to crawl it. Conversely, Google’s search engine bots can usually crawl such non-text content with few issues.