What our SEO Agency can do for you?
Updated
SEO helps people find you on search engines, and in China that means Baidu. We are an affordable SEO agency built for startups, small budgets and niche brands, not just big spenders. In 2026 the work has two sides: the classic SEO that still ranks your pages, and the new AI-search work that gets your brand quoted in Baidu’s AI answer. Here is exactly what we do for you, step by step.
SEO Agency China (SAC): affordable SEO and AI-search help for the Chinese market
Below, please find all the details of the SEO campaign to improve or increase your online presence.
We cover all the necessary online marketing strategies step by step:
GEO and AI-search optimization (new for 2026)
Baidu rebuilt search around AI on 2 July 2025. The search bar is now a “Smart Box” (智能框), and an AI answer called Baikan (百看) sits above the blue links. Baidu’s Wenxin Assistant (文心助手) passed 200 million monthly users by January 2026. So ranking a page is no longer enough, you also need to be the source the AI quotes. That is GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, and it is now part of every plan we run.
For GEO we do three things: build one consistent brand entity across Baidu Baike, Baijiahao and your own site, rewrite key pages answer-first so the AI can lift clean answers, and keep the technical base solid (ICP licence, China hosting, fast mobile pages, Baidu Webmaster Tools). It works alongside the classic SEO steps below, and it fits small budgets because it targets the few pages that matter most. To see how the rules changed, read our 2025 Baidu SEO guide.
Analysis:
- Current status of your website.
- Analysis of your competitors.
- Analysis of your business/product/service.
- Analysis of keywords & online competition.
- Technical analysis of website in-terms of SEO.
The first step is to know where you are on the search engines, what is your ranking on the search engines and analyze the keywords that you are using to improve them.
The second step is to make a competition analysis in order to know where you are compared to your competitors, what content have given them better results or what their strategy is.
It is essential to identify your main competitors and what keywords they are using to rank on search engines with the aim to create your plan of keywords.
All this will give us information about which keywords they are using to rank, the content of their website and most importantly; the information necessary to create a strategy to improve your SEO and overcome your competitors.
This analysis is the pillar of any SEO strategy. Therefore it is vital to make a deep study to design an efficient strategy and locate your website on the first page of search engines.
On-page Optimization:
- Fixing all the technical errors of website.
- Optimizing the keywords appropriately.
- Based on the analysis reports – Preparing road-map to achieve results/rankings.
An on-page factor analysis will give us a global perspective of your web. We will ensure that your contents can be read and evaluated optimally by web crawlers. We carefully analyze the visible content of your page and our experts will examine and optimize your website. Thus, it is possible to find weaknesses and offer concrete solutions and optimization measures.
We will analyze the usability and accessibility of your website in order to know what your strengths and weaknesses are and how to improve your site to offer a better user experience.
We define relevant search terms and suggest new keywords that would be worth optimizing. We also analyze the positioning, competition and volume of national and international search of your keywords.
Keeping in mind your target audience, your services and your products, we will choose the appropriate keywords to include in your SEO strategy. Thanks to the appropriate keywords, your potential customers will be able to find your company and your services on search engines.
Off-page Optimization (Promotional Activities):
- Traditional way: Articles, Press Releases, Directories, One way, Reciprocal links etc
- SMO: FaceBook, Twitter, Linked In, Bookmarks, Videos etc
Off-Page SEO is a technique that we can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, including social networking, articles, Press Releases, directories and recripocal links. We will share your content and products on those online platforms.
We study your structure of backlinks and their quality and effectiveness. We analyze the links using multiple values such as content relevance, positioning values and importance on search engines. We also analyze the structure of backlinks because the best ranking on search engines is obtained with a particular combination of different quality backlinks.
It is about the number of times that your website is linked, from where and with what terms. We will build external links pointing to your site and each link to your site is seen by search engines as a vote of confidence in the website.
What can we do for you?
Firstly we thoroughly analyse your website. Auditing your website gives us key information about what to improve to make you rank better on search engine result page, this is called on site optimisation.
We will select the most relevant keywords to your product offer
We will select and optimize your keywords and thanks to those keywords, your website will rank on the top page of the search engines.
Also we will build quality links to your website, create quality contents to promote your site via social media platforms and we will use different techniques to on page optimization and onsite optimization.
What are the results?
Your website will be on the top pages of the search engines for targeted keywords and you will receive permanent high PR back-links which will increase your website traffic.
In addition, through updates social media profile it will increase the popularity of your company. In a nutshell, the traffic of your website and your ROI will increase exponentially.
Cost: our prices are custom and depend on how many keywords you want to promote. We keep packages small enough for startups.
If you are interested to improve your search engine ranking, contact us and get a free consultation with one our experts.
The 2026 market reality: what the data shows
China now has 1.125 billion internet users, with a penetration rate of 80.1%, according to China’s official government statistics citing CNNIC data. Baidu holds roughly 70% mobile search market share, with over 724 million monthly active devices as of early 2026, per Search Engine Land. At the same time, generative AI usage in China hit 602 million users by December 2025, a 141.7% year-on-year increase, per CNNIC. For any foreign brand trying to reach Chinese buyers, these three numbers tell you where the game is being played: Baidu search, mobile-first content, and AI-powered discovery. If your brand is not visible on all three, you are leaving qualified traffic on the table.
What an SEO agency actually does on Baidu
Most brands entering China make the same mistake. They run their global SEO playbook through a local vendor, see mediocre results, and conclude that Baidu SEO does not work. It works. The problem is the approach.
Baidu’s ranking algorithm weights several factors that differ significantly from Google. Server location matters: hosting your Chinese site on a mainland server, or using a CDN node inside China, reduces page load time and signals trust to Baidu’s crawler. An ICP license (Internet Content Provider permit) is mandatory for any site hosted in mainland China and acts as a baseline trust factor. Without it, your domain will not index properly, no matter how clean your on-page work is.
Beyond technical setup, Baidu places strong weight on content depth and freshness. A static product page from 2022 will not compete with a competitor publishing monthly long-form content in Simplified Chinese. Keyword research on Baidu uses different tools than Google, primarily Baidu Index and Baidu Keyword Planner, and the search intent behind Chinese queries often differs from equivalent English searches. Chinese B2B buyers, for instance, search for solution categories and brand comparisons far more than generic problem descriptions.
A China SEO agency handles this entire stack: ICP filing coordination, technical audits specific to Baidu’s crawler, Chinese keyword mapping, content production in Simplified Chinese, and link acquisition from Chinese media properties. Each of these steps requires people with direct experience on the platform. A generalist agency based in London or New York cannot replicate this without local infrastructure.
The return is measurable. Organic search leads cost roughly $31 per acquisition versus $181 for paid search, according to SeoProfy’s 2026 SEO ROI benchmarks. On Baidu, where click costs in competitive B2B categories have risen sharply since 2023, that cost gap makes organic SEO an increasingly rational budget allocation.
GEO: the layer that most agencies ignore
Since 2024, Baidu has been rewriting how search results look. AI-generated answer boxes now appear at the top of results pages for a growing share of queries. These answers are pulled from Baidu Ernie, Baidu’s large language model, which reached over 200 million users in 2026. The implication for brands is direct: if Ernie does not know your brand exists, you will not appear in those answer boxes, even if you rank organically for the underlying keywords.
This is the problem that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) solves. GEO is not a replacement for SEO. It runs alongside it. The goal is to make your brand’s information available in the sources that Baidu’s AI reads when constructing answers: Baidu Baike (the Chinese Wikipedia equivalent), Baidu Zhidao (Q&A platform), authoritative Chinese media, and structured data on your own domain.
One real example: a European industrial components manufacturer running a standard Baidu SEO campaign saw solid keyword rankings for their product category terms. After adding a verified Baidu Baike entry and seeding structured content on Baidu Zhidao, they started appearing in Ernie answer boxes for procurement-related queries. Traffic from those AI results converted at a higher rate than standard organic clicks, because users arriving from an AI answer had already received a summary that positioned the brand as a credible option.
Over 70% of Chinese search queries now result in zero-click journeys, per data cited in ChinaSEO.com’s 2026 GEO analysis. The user gets the answer on the results page and never clicks through. For brands, this means that being cited in the AI answer is often more valuable than ranking in position one of the blue-link results below it. An agency that only optimizes for traditional ranking positions is solving half the problem.
GEO work on Baidu requires specific actions: claiming and populating your Baidu Baike profile with accurate sourced content, building presence on Baidu Zhidao and Baidu Wenku, ensuring your site uses schema markup compatible with Chinese crawlers, and maintaining a publishing cadence that signals freshness to Ernie’s retrieval layer. This is not optional for brands that sell in categories where Chinese buyers research online before purchasing.
What changed between 2024 and 2026
In 2024, Baidu SEO was primarily a keyword-and-backlink problem. You mapped the right Chinese keywords, built content around them, and acquired links from relevant Chinese domains. That still works, but it is no longer sufficient on its own.
Two shifts happened in parallel. First, Baidu deployed AI-generated answer boxes at scale across commercial queries starting in late 2024. Second, Chinese users adopted AI tools for product research faster than any other market: 602 million generative AI users by end of 2025 means that a significant fraction of your potential customers are now asking AI assistants about your product category before they ever open a browser tab.
This changed the content brief. In 2024, a good Baidu article needed to be 1,500 words with the right keyword density, internal links, and a meta description optimized for click-through. In 2026, the same article also needs to contain clear factual statements about your brand, structured so that an LLM can extract and cite them accurately. Content that is vague, promotional, or keyword-stuffed gets ignored by AI retrieval systems regardless of how well it ranks in traditional results.
Social search also grew faster than expected. Xiaohongshu (RED) became a primary product discovery channel for consumer goods, with users treating it as a search engine for lifestyle purchases. Douyin’s search function expanded into B2B categories. Brands that ran SEO in isolation from social content started losing share-of-voice to competitors who coordinated both channels. A China SEO strategy in 2026 requires at minimum a position on what is happening on RED and Douyin, even if the agency’s primary mandate is Baidu.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to see results from Baidu SEO?
For a new domain entering the Chinese market, expect 4 to 6 months before meaningful organic traffic appears. This timeline includes ICP license processing (typically 4 to 8 weeks), initial technical setup, and the time Baidu needs to crawl and index new content. For established domains with existing Chinese content, targeted campaigns can show ranking movement in 6 to 10 weeks. The variables that speed this up: a clean site architecture, hosting with low latency to mainland China, and content published consistently rather than in a single batch. Paid search (Baidu SEM) can run in parallel during the organic ramp-up period to maintain lead flow while SEO builds.
Do I need a separate Chinese website or can I use a subdomain?
Both structures can work, but the choice has real consequences. A separate.cn domain with mainland hosting gives you the strongest Baidu trust signals and allows you to apply for an ICP license directly on that domain. A subdomain (cn.yourdomain.com) on your global site is faster to launch but may load slowly inside China if your global hosting is not CDN-optimized for the region. A subdirectory (yourdomain.com/zh/) on a globally hosted site is the weakest option for Baidu performance. The right answer depends on your budget, how many pages you plan to publish in Chinese, and whether you intend to run Baidu paid ads, which require a verified Chinese business entity or a local partner.
What is the difference between Baidu SEO and Baidu SEM?
Baidu SEO (Search Engine Optimization) targets organic, unpaid rankings. It builds over time and does not stop generating traffic when you pause spend. Baidu SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is Baidu’s paid ad platform, similar in structure to Google Ads. SEM results appear at the top of the page above organic results, marked as ads. SEM delivers immediate visibility but stops the moment your budget runs out. The two channels serve different functions. SEM is useful for product launches, seasonal campaigns, and testing which keywords convert before investing in organic content. SEO is the long-term asset that reduces cost-per-lead as domain authority grows. Most brands running serious China digital marketing use both.
Can a foreign company rank on Baidu without a Chinese entity?
Yes, with limits. Foreign companies can rank organically on Baidu without a Chinese business entity. However, hosting your site on mainland China servers, which gives the best performance, requires an ICP license, which in turn requires a Chinese business entity or a local licensed partner. Without mainland hosting, your site can still index and rank, but page load speeds inside China may hurt your bounce rate and Baidu’s user experience signals. For paid search on Baidu, foreign companies need either a local entity or to work through a certified Baidu marketing agent. Most China-entry brands start with a Hong Kong entity or use an agency as the licensed account holder while the mainland entity paperwork is processed.
How to move forward
The starting point depends on where you are. If you have no Chinese digital presence, the first step is a technical audit: domain structure, hosting, ICP status, and Baidu indexation. From there, keyword research in Simplified Chinese shapes the content plan. If you already have a Chinese site but weak traffic, the issue is usually one of three things: thin content, slow load speed, or no GEO presence in Baidu’s AI layer.
For brands selling in China’s consumer or B2B markets, the channel mix matters beyond Baidu. A WeChat presence builds the trust layer that converts search traffic into leads. Xiaohongshu handles product discovery for lifestyle and consumer categories. These channels feed each other: users who discover your brand on RED then search for it on Baidu before purchasing.
If you want to understand what is realistic for your category and budget, the simplest next step is a conversation. We scope projects based on the actual search volume for your product in China, the competitive landscape on Baidu, and your existing digital assets. No generic proposals. Contact us to get a category-specific assessment.
Marcus Zhan is a China marketing specialist based in Shanghai. He covers digital marketing, consumer trends, and brand strategy for the Chinese market.
Sources: China Government Statistics via CNNIC, Feb 2026 | Search Engine Land: China’s fragmented search ecosystem, 2026 | SeoProfy: SEO ROI Statistics 2026 | ChinaSEO.com: The 2026 shift from SEO to GEO in China