Baidu announced yesterday that its important research and analysis tool – Baidu Index is having an important upgrade for its mobile version.
Baidu Index’s mobile homepage is now providing data reports on some popular events, like Beijing Auto Show, with popular automobiles listed with respective index numbers.
Besides, the page also shows links of “hot keywords” pointing to their index data, such as popular game “King of Glory” and Chinese mobile phone brand MIUI.
Baidu claimed that these “hot keywords” are shown based on users’ focuses, but after I logged in my Baidu account, I could only see the same keywords as shown in the official announcement about this upgrade.
Maybe Baidu would customize my interested keywords according to my future searches, just like that way it provides customized news feeds based on people’s searches on its app “Simple Search”.
But I doubt this because I’m not using any Baidu apps on my phone – I open pages of Baidu search and Baidu Index on my Safari browser.
Another important new feature is “demand map”, which could be very useful for keyword research of SEO, as it provides a graph of relevant keywords and their profiles.
For example, when you search “SEO” on it, you see this:
The relevant keywords surrounding the seed keyword are placed at difference distances based on degrees of relevancy, and among the relevant keywords of “SEO”, orange ones are seeing increasing search volumes while green ones are seeing declining volumes.
Anyway, it’s glad to see upgrades on Baidu Index as an important tool for market research and SEO.
Like Google Trends, Baidu Index provides search trends of various keywords it tracks, as well as user portraits and other relevant data, and now it’s offering data reports of certain industries and keywords.
However, overseas users not speaking Chinese would need a professional SEO agency like Jinray to help them understand such data and reports. And as for more data like keywords’ search volumes, other tools would be needed.