Everything you need to know to use SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) on Baidu

When we know that Baidu is the number 1 search engine in China with almost 80% of the market share, it’s clearly the place where you want to be seen on the Chinese Internet.

Quick hello first. I am Jon Wang, and I help foreign brands get found on Baidu without wasting money. Google is blocked in China, so Baidu is how a billion people find you. If you are invisible there, you are invisible in China. Let me walk you through what actually works in 2026.

And obviously on the first or second page !

Nonetheless it will not work like the typical Google that we all know. To increase your ranking, you will need fullfill more than the condition we are used to. This is where the SEO gets important.

Baidu VS google

The main differences between the Chinese search engine and the Western one, is that compared to Google, Baidu doesn’t have the technology that evaluates and indexes the most interesting and relevant informations. Therefore, we will advise you to apply the same SEO rules to Baidu that you’re used to do on Google. China will eventually catch up at this point in the near future so it will be already something you know when the time comes. So what you need to be able to do for your on-line business is to gain ranking on Baidu and have the maximum exposure on the digital market. And for this, you have to use SEO to win popularity on the Web.

The Chinese Internet, a different world

Because of the censorship of the Chinese government, a lot of foreign websites are being punished by being put in the last pages of Baidu. To avoid that, you firstly need to submit your site to Baidu. Without this permission, you have no chance to get indexed in the 1st search engine of the country. To do so, start by following this link. It’s also necessary to submit a site map to help them to find all your web pages. Follow this link to get the chance to. To finish on the structural point of view, you have to use a different htlm code than normally. The two platforms to use are UTF-8 or GB2312. But the first one is better considering it caters any language in the world.

After having your site on the Chinese Internet, we advise you to use the Chinese characters. Most of the Chinese still don’t speak English or very little and won’t take the time to use a translator, thus it is greatly appreciated by the population to have a site in their language. Baidu uses only simple Chinese characters that everyone in China can understand and share the same search engine. With all the different dialect within China, Baidu had the intelligence of using several different characters for the same keyword. Therefore, foreign company just need simplified traditional Chinese characters to hope rising in the Baidu ranking. It also indexes « Pin-Yin ». The Baidu doesn’t index English words (or it’s mostly inaccurate) so they allows users to write how the symbol sound phonetically.

Some tips to be well-ranked

Google has been banned from the country last year and since, Baidu has been more powerful than ever. It almost got the monopoly of the market. Failing in China with 2% of share, Google is out of the picture. However, Bing has been particularly clever by creating a partnership with Baidu and ensuring that some of their results will also appear in Baidu’s results. Therefore, if your English website is on the top 3 on Bing and your Chinese simplified one is as well, your visibility will be extremely prevalent in the Chinese market. So what are you waiting for? Say yes to Bing.

One of the things you need to know to succeed in your SEO  is that, unlike Google, Baidu places significant importance on metadata. For example Meta description and Meta keywords but also Title tags and H1, H2, and Alt tags. These information are really important to Baidu’s spiders. You need to have them imperatively and be sure that it is translated into simple Chinese and well-written.

Content for baidu

If you want a good ranking, you should also be aware of the keyword density (around 6% to 10%), anchor words on internal links (in other words a clickable link to go from one of your pages to another), easy navigation with a clear hierarchy, no flash or JavaScript because it won’t work with Baidu, same as Frame and iFrame that is better to minimize. We also advise you to keep the most important content at the top of your page because Baidu’s spiders have a lack of connectivity and will only crawl the first 100k or 120 kilobytes of your page. Last but not the least, you should keep refreshing your content.

When it comes to the location of your website, you should host it on a Chinese server. Also having a Chinese extension domain name (like .cn or com.cn) is helpful. (but not necessary in 2023)

Baidu prefers this but it’s not necessary to be ranked in a good position. As for the keyword performance, check The Baidu Index or The Baidu Live keyword feed to see which ones is the best to use.

User experience matter for 2023

If you want to increase the number of visitors to your site, you have to diversify the location across the internet. By that, you can add new posts to Baidu News Protocol, promote your brand on the Chinese website as much as possible by posting news, use simple Chinese characters again, and submit pages of your site to Baidu Social Bookmarking Tool.

The more other sites linking to your site is really important on the ranking factor. Still, you need to know that the quality of links doesn’t matter that much, at least from the SEO point of view but the quantity does though. Also, having inbound links from well-ranking, reputable and relevant Chinese sites is a plus. Outbound isn’t that important. As a last tip, you should use a Pay-Per-Click strategy.

The best solution for you in order to promote your brand the right way is to use experts in SEO help to help you. Our team of SEO/SEM experts will be able to help you design a top-grade SEO/SEM marketing campaign to raise your visibility on the Chinese internet.

Further readings :

• Our latest SEO news
• How to excel in SEO baidu
• Learn more about us and our Baidu SEO/SEM Services

If you need an agency that can care about your ranking on Baidu

We will be happy to Help

Baidu SEO essentials at a glance

Topic	2026 reality	Your move
Market share	Baidu ~64% all devices, ~78% mobile	Treat Baidu as the front door
AI search	AI Overview answers before the click	Be the source it quotes
Hosting	China with ICP, or HK/Singapore	Fix speed first
Content	Native Simplified Chinese	Drop the translator

How we get brands ranking on Baidu

We are a small Shanghai team, and we learned Baidu the hard way so our clients would not have to. One German maker of automotive glass came to us invisible in China: no ranking, no enquiries, ready to give up on the market. We rebuilt their site in Chinese, hosted it properly, earned links on Chinese B2B platforms, and put them on the first page of Baidu for the searches their buyers actually use. Within months real Chinese importers were getting in touch. That is the work: the boring, technical, patient SEO that quietly wins you the market. Baidu is your front door, and we know how to open it.

Want to be found on Baidu? 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 exactly where to start.

Baidu is now an AI answer engine, and 200 million people use it

Baidu’s ERNIE assistant passed 200 million monthly active users in December 2025, about 30% of the people on its main app, and AI search API calls grew more than 110% in a single quarter. So Baidu does not just list ten blue links anymore, it reads the web and writes the answer. For a foreign brand this changes the goal: you no longer fight only for rank one, you fight to be the source the AI quotes back to the user. The brands that publish clear, native Chinese content win twice, once in the classic results and once inside the AI answer. source.

What Chinese pros say on Zhihu

A long-running Zhihu thread asks straight out whether Baidu SEO is dead. The honest answers from people who do this for a living are worth more than any sales page.

Q: “Is Baidu SEO already dead in name only?”

A (translated): “Baidu SEO is not dead. The methods and the strategy have changed, that is all. As Baidu keeps upgrading its algorithm and adds AI, it asks more of your site, so the way you optimize has to keep moving with it. The old SEO trick-playing is finished, but the SEO mindset stays: content first, user experience first, conversion first. Use that thinking to grow traffic and sales for your own project, and that is what the new SEO person should care about.”

That matches what we see every day: the brands that treat Baidu as a real channel still get found and still get enquiries. Read the thread on Zhihu.

The opportunity, and how to take it

Most foreign competitors give up on Baidu, which leaves the front door open for you. Here is how it pays off: for a consumer brand, we point Baidu traffic at a Chinese e-commerce store, so buyers who search go straight to a page where they can buy. For a B2B maker, we build a lead-generation funnel, ranking pages that bring Chinese importers and distributors to a contact form, the way we did for a German automotive glass maker who went from invisible to fielding real enquiries. Our edge is simple: a small Shanghai team, Chinese-native writers, results we can measure instead of vanity metrics, and prices that fit smaller brands. If you want to know where to start, talk to us.

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