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.
How could this happen? These companies might have little knowledge about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and they are probably being misled by agents of Baidu PPC.
When I worked for China Mobile, representatives from regional agents of Baidu PPC kept frequent contact with my department lead, and they usually held seminars in our company. But what they talked about was often nonsense. They would confuse you by a lot of technical terms and boast how much profits Baidu PPC has brought to their clients.
It’s true that their clients get benefits from Baidu PPC, but it’s truer that such clients are probably wasting big money on wrong keywords recommended by Baidu PPC.
So I make some keyword research for China Mobile’s website and adapted its titles, within three months, its organic search traffic from Baidu tripled and kept growing afterwards.
For another instance, a friend of mine complained to me that local agent of Baidu PPC once made a big mistake on their primary products: they sell lobster ingredients but representatives from Baidu PPC agent used “lobster” for their rank bidding campaign, which is always popular but a very expensive keyword to buy, and brought no real customers to his factory. Of course, the representatives “found” the mistake later, corrected their mistake and started to bring real customers, but my friend had wasted a lot of money on it – he would have saved the money if he knew me earlier.
For many overseas companies coming to China, they’ve got domains with high authority for the Chinese market, but they are missing the best keywords for their Chinese websites – even their brand names in some cases. And they are paying tens of thousands of dollars or even more to Baidu even month, usually for nothing real.
I’m not saying that Baidu PPC itself is wrong or evil, but their agents could be unscrupulous in order to make easy money, and it’s not necessary for many websites to spend money on it.
Instead, if they just add one correct keyword to their home page, they will soon gain huge traffic without paying any regular money – except a much lower one-time consultation fee to a reliable SEO agency from China, like Jinray Language Services.
So, keep your eyes open when thinking about Baidu PPC, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any concerns about this.