Through my recent experience doing SEO for a large company, I finally learned to compromise and thus make the keyword list look nice, even though it meant wasting time and being flashy.
Tag: Chinese keyword research for Baidu
The more keyword researches and planning we do, the more we feel how sophisticated they are. But not all SEO agencies feel the same way.
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More keywords are better? No!
Recently we are working with a multinational language service agency on a keyword project of SEO.
The client has provided us with a list of English source keywords, and we are required to develop Chinese keywords based on it. At first, we provided one or two keywords for each source word, but the client was not satisfied, and they insisted that we should provide at least one alternative for each Chinese keyword.
When I started to work as a SEO for China Mobile’s official website for mobile games, I was surprised to find that China Mobile was paying big money for its brand name “China Mobile” to Baidu Pay-per-click (Baidu PPC), or “Baidu Ads” as some people call it.
The same ridiculous thing is happening to many overseas enterprises establishing businesses in China. They are paying big bucks to Baidu PPC for rankings of their brand names or their major products/services, and they don’t bother to even add one correct keyword to their website.
When I did SEO tasks for overseas clients/PMs, I found it very easy to not tell the truth to the clients or simply cheat them, and meanwhile offer them a perfect-looking sheet with useless or even harmful keywords the clients would never be aware of – I just never do it that way. And this is not only due to language barrier, but because of some specific steps in SEO processes like keyword research.
For example, some acronyms could be very deceptive, like “ECM”. This term is usually used to mean “Enterprise Content Management” in the west, and also “Engine Control Module” in some cases; but in China, things are very different, people mostly use it to refer to the latter, and rarely use it for the former.
Meta keywords tag was a common practice in SEO for any search engines, but you might not know that it’s been abandoned by most search engines, like Baidu.
Baidu’s engineer LEE, who is in charge of answering questions publicly about SEO, made it clear in August 2012 that meta keywords tag had become a history for Baidu, and Baidu totally ignores it. Here are the screenshots of his words in Chinese during a dialogue with Chinese webmasters:
Keyword research is the fundamental step before content optimization, which is critical for SEO of any websites, including SEO for Baidu. All Baidu SEO agencies provide services of keyword research and content optimization, so does Jinray.
But the work process has become very rigid while content work needs inspirations and flexibilities to find the best keyword and content solutions for websites. And here are six reasons why your way of keyword research could keep the best keyword options away from your websites.
Search volumes of keywords from any tools could be inaccurate
In years, we’ve been using professional and official tools offered by Baidu to determine search volumes of any keywords, these volumes are the most reliable figures on the planet, cannot be provided by any SEO agencies outside of mainland China, except they are cooperating with a Chinese agency like Jinray SEO.
But we also found that these official volumes could also be inaccurate. In some cases, we spot a great keyword with significant search volumes and we write splendid content around it, but later we could find that few people actually search this word.
It’s very common that in SEO work, SEO clients or agencies would provide a unified sheet to do keyword research and content optimization, in which various limits are suggested for all kinds of texts, including meta tags like titles and descriptions, as well as article bodies.
But SEO for Baidu is far beyond this, even in the content part alone. Jinray suggests that all such work should be customized based on the client’s products or services and articles that could be provide by the client.
And in this process, close communications between SEOs and copywriters are required due to following possible circumstances: