One Billion Searchers
Filed under: Education and Training, SEO on Monday, August 20th, 2007 by Simon HeseltineContinuing my live coverage of Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007…
This panel is on the topic of the emerging market of China, and the opportunities for Search marketing. The moderator for the session is Mike Grehan.
The first speaker is Stephen Noton, who is a speaker at SES China, and his company became the first AdWord qualified company in Asia. He is a replacement for the original main speaker who was unable to make it to the conference.
12 of the top 100 websites in china have completely numerical URLs. 27 of the top 100 contain numbers. Chinese keyboards have 13,500 characters, so it’s easier for people to understand numbers rather than having to translate across different dialects.
He talked about Google branding itself GuGe (Valley of the Song) in China, and showed the video they launched with. The Google suggest product is a default option in China because of the number of characters (this is a standard on all search engines in China). Google also has a ‘Popular Searches’ page, which has no search box, but has links to SERPs. They also have a directory system in China, based on topics, psp themes and services. It is algorithmically based, not static.
Next up, Bill Hunt. The Chinese market is growing like crazy. It is tough to be a foreigner in China. Budgets are small from local companies. Some large companies in China are more sophisticated than their corporate HQ. Clients are very particular about their contacts in your company, they prefer to have contacts with Western experience, rather than all local people. You should allow clients or interactive agencies to save face.
Relationships are critical to success, with clients, search engines, and influencers. Your employees can make or break a deal in the long run. Much of the advertising is still branded and less lead generation or sales focused. Be flexible and do business the Chinese way. Keep an open mind.
Attendance at SES China went from 600 to 1000 in the space of a year. The audience is becoming more sophisticated and asking deeper questions. 10x increase in requests for China projects. Lots of testing of paid and mobile search. Traffic to search blogs in China has increased significantly. There has been an increase in Chinese centric blogs and content. 10-15 of the top agencies stand out, but there are unfortunately lots of SEM scammers in China. SEO tends to be simple meta tag optimization or black hat. They are integrating more advanced techniques, including Social Media Optimization.
Employee turnover in China is high. Incentives for employee loyalty are critical. Build your relationships with engines and organizations. If partnering with a Chinese firm, do your research.
93% of people in China are there to get news, compared to 67% in the US. only 69% use it to get email, compared to 91% in the US. 96.3% use desktops. 21.1% use laptops. 27.3% use mobile search. Mobile search has been growing over 100% for the last few years. By 2010 the number of mobile searchers are estimate to be 220 million in China alone.
Baidu is the most popular search engine for lifestyle searches (ring tones, music, horoscope, etc). Top 30 are generally paid ads. Baidu has greatest reach with young lifestyle centric searchers. CPM advertising is the most popular on Baidu.
New travel opportunities for Chinese have resulted in significant traffic to country related information sites. Make sure that you market to the Chinese on their terms and on their comfort level. A big growth area is in access to information about China and the Olympics.
