5 secrets of Chinese SEO (update 2026)

Quick hello first. I am Jon Wang, and I help foreign brands win on Baidu without wasting money. Chinese SEO is not Western SEO with Chinese words. It has its own rules, its own platforms and now its own AI search. Here are the secrets that actually move rankings in 2026.

In China, companies need to be well situated on search engines to reach more potential clients or consumers.

• SEO in B2B is very effective in China
• SEO in B2C is a great way to influence new clients
• SEO can allow you to reply questions of people and get them to know you better .

SEO in China is a powerful tool in order to catch more clients even in 2023.

In china, one billion people are using internet to search for information.

In addition, e-commerce is increasing in China over the last years. In 2022, 702 million people have bought items through internet and are regular e-Commerce Shopper

Companies that want to have presence in China should start by Baidu, the most popular search engine in China, which has over 70 percent market share. Baidu is a very powerful channel for marketers who want to increase their presence into the Chinese market.

There is a big presence of internet in the Chinese daily life since the integration of mobile devices, therefore Chinese netizens are in constant touch with information about different themes or products, music, videos or online purchasing. Nowadays, Baidu is the most popular platform to Chinese consumers in order to access those contents.

For brands which want to have presence on Baidu, it is very important to know the tools offered by the search engine in order to make the most of its possibilities.

1. Baidu interface and its tabs:

News: Baidu offers a news section, which includes sections such as sport, property, international and domestic.

Web page:

This feature show the search results. Here appear the organic and paid search results, however are more complicated to perceive than in Google.

Forums:

This feature acts like a micro-blog of Baidu. With this tool, people can open forums in order to share and collect information. To find forums, it is necessary use search keywords about the subject desired.

Baidu Know:

Users who are registered in Baidu, can ask questions and other users can answer them and get credits through this platform. It is a colective intelligence tool, which enables users to share their knowledge.

BaiJiahao :

A kind of yahoo news services, where user can read analysis, articles. Where publisher can publish press releases and added value articles.

Baidu Wendu

Baidu has launch in 2021 a library for knowledge. This service allow user to publish official source, books, thesis.

Baidu B2B

This equivalent to alibaba connect Factories to users. Purchasers can buy directly from factories.

Music:

Users can search, listen and download music.

They also have the ability to rate it.

Images:

Baidu has a huge database of images, and since the search engine has kicked Google out of China, its database is often very different from what you could find on Google for instance.

Video:

Users can find videos related with their search keywords

Maps:

This section allows user to find places via maps.

Baidu Baike :

Baidu Baike is a collaborative encyclopedia that has a total of 10 million articles and 5 million registered users

Library:

This tool offers a library of resources about the search terms. The information is available in many formats such as DOC, PPT, TXT, PDF and XLS.

Baidu Labs

Baidu Research, is a new AI research lab initiated by Baidu, they publish its predictions on January 5 for the top 10 technology trends of 2023, including

big models, digital-real convergence, virtual-real symbiosis, autonomous driving cars, robots innovation, scientific quantum computing,, privacy & cyber security, ethics in technology, and of course sustainability.

2. Pay per click (PPC)

Baidu pay-per-click is a payment model of search engine marketing which allows companies place its brands in a priority position on Baidu.

PPC it’s an important tool in order to get a great position quickly in the search engine. That’s why, brands have to know how to setup a Baidu PPC account.

The process duration takes roughly two weeks to be completed and a Baidu reseller will be the person in charge to the account setup as Baidu’s requirement. They are in charge to handle the administration and control the whole process.

The site doesn’t need to be hosted in China, but some translations are necessaries. It is better hire a local agency in order to translate documents and the information of the website into Mandarin language.

To create an account, Baidu requested 5000 Chinese Yuan, and it’s only possible pay with the local currency.

Once the Baidu PPC account is created, you can use its tools to create your adverts. For example, Baidu offers different sizes’s ads and they can be targeted by keywords, region, industry, time of the day and part of the day.

3. Baidu Brand Zone

Baidu has an exclusive service for PPC account members called Brand Zone. Through this tool, companies can have their own and exclusive keywords related with its brands. This means that those keywords can not be used by other Baidu advertise. Brand zone allows to the companies offer some of its content to users without have to get to the brand site.

4. Baidu Analytics

Baidu Analytics is a tool to analyze the campaign performance. Tongji is the name of Baidu’s analysis tool. This platform allows brands view the ad impressions, cost data and everything in between. Also, it is possible to know the pages which have been visited by each individual user.

Through baidu heat map, companies are able to know what website areas have been the more clicked, how many clicks they received, the traffic source and keywords. However, this data is only available during the next seven days. Other feature of Baidu Analytics is the chance to know the number of pages that have been indexed by Baidu.

Nevertheless there are some deficiencies compared to Google Analytics, as for example the fact that the interface is only in Chinese or there is no e-commerce tracking.

5. Baidu webmaster tools

Zhangzhang is a Baidu’s websmaster tool which allows to know the indexing status of and optimisation of the website in an easy and quick way. This tool create a list of broken links of the website and also avoids bad inbound links that can affect negatively to the page ranking.

With Zhangzhang it’s possible to know what keywords seaches on Baidu are driving the users into the website.

It is also helpful to check the click through rates for the listings and know the list internal and external pages that link to the site.

Baidu has a vital importance into the Chinese online market. That’s why, brands which want to develop an efficient SEO strategy in China in order to increase its presence and therefore its sales, have to understand the functions and tools of the Chinese search engine.

If you are interested in increase your presence en China, don’t hesitate to contact us, we can help you to improve into the Chinese market.

Sources:

• SEO Baidu is essential to attract Chinese industrial buyers
• SEO&SEM can boost your e-commerce business in China.
• SEO in China
• Learn more about us and our Baidu SEO/SEM Services

The secrets of Chinese SEO at a glance

Secret	2026 reality	Your move
Hosting	Speed inside China wins	Host with ICP, or HK/Singapore
Language	Native Chinese only	Drop the translator
Authority	Chinese platforms beat foreign links	Earn Zhihu and Baijiahao mentions
AI search	AI Overview quotes clear content	Structure pages to be the source

How we win Chinese SEO

We are a small Shanghai team, and we learned Chinese SEO by doing, the hard way. One B2B consulting client, INS Global, came to us invisible on Baidu. We rebuilt their Chinese content, earned trust links on Chinese platforms, and structured every page so Baidu and its AI box could read it. They went from nowhere to first page for the searches their clients use, and the enquiries followed. The secret is patience and local know-how, and it is exactly what we do every week.

Want to crack Chinese SEO? We are friendly, our prices fit smaller brands, and our results are real. Get in touch through our contact form and we will show you where to start.

Chinese search is going zero-click, and that changes the game

The big shift in 2026 is not a new ranking trick. It is that people stop clicking. Around 70% of searches in China now end with an AI answer at the top of the page, so the user reads the box and never visits a site. Baidu still has the reach to make this matter, with about 724 million monthly active devices and close to 70% of mobile search in early 2026, and B2B Baidu traffic is still converting at rates above what brands see in the UK or Germany. The job now is to write pages so clear that the AI box quotes you by name, because being the source of the answer beats being link number seven. Search Engine Land.

What Chinese pros say on Zhihu

One of the most read Baidu SEO threads on Zhihu asks the plain question every founder asks. The top answers are refreshingly honest about what actually works.

Q: “How do you do Baidu SEO?”

A (translated): “Do not chase big keywords on a new site. Start with your brand words and low-competition long-tail terms, and slowly build Baidu’s trust in your domain. Content is king, because search engines exist to solve user needs, so the page that genuinely helps the reader is the one that ranks. Updating on a steady, regular schedule matters more than anything. And authority means backlinks, so target vertical platforms in your own industry rather than low-quality sites.”

That matches what we see every day: patience, useful Chinese content, and links from real industry platforms. Read the thread on Zhihu.

The opportunity, and how to take it

So here is the opening. Most foreign brands still write for Google, which means the AI box on Baidu has almost no good Chinese source to quote, and that gap is yours to fill. It turns into money two ways: an e-commerce store that gets found from Baidu and the AI answer, and a B2B lead funnel where the right buyer reads your page, trusts it, and fills the form. We are a small Shanghai team, all Chinese-native, we report results rather than vanity metrics, and our prices fit smaller brands. If that sounds useful, talk to us.

Sources: search market data from StatCounter China and the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).