Why your site does not perform well in China

I checked some Chinese sites from European companies, besides a few multi-national companies, many does not rank well on Baidu, and some even not being indexed. If your site cannot be found/rank well on Baidu, the biggest Chinese search engine, how can you expect high-qualified relevant traffic? Now it comes to a question, why the site does not rank well on Baidu?

From my experience, I conclude some key factors on sites.

Content

Content have to be Baidu friendly. So a direct translate from other language does not automatically become optimized content, and sometimes the quality of translation is not high enough. The direct translation is difficult to read and also does not fit the way of expression with no focus on keywords and browsing behavior. Since content is essential to a website, the site cannot perform well on a poor content.

Link
Baidu values links, but the links should be high-qualifies under Baidu’s standard. Image the links your site have are not favored by Baidu, no matter how many you have, it will have no effect on Baidu SEO. You need to have a different link-building strategy for the Chinese site so that your links can help on SEO.

Site structure
Baidu favors flat site structure. It may also mean that the technology of Baidu is not advanced enough to crawl too deep on the site. Make sure do not hide any important information somewhere in the corner.

Loading time
Loading time is an important factor for Baidu SEO. The same as Google, it is for user experience. Unfortunately, the loading time for many sites is quite long.

1.    Server is far from China. For many sites, it is hosted far away from China plus the great firewall, both leads to a long loading time. If the loading time is long, visitors may not have the patient to wait and will leave though they do not even see the content.
2.    Internet connection. If the internet connection is slow for visitors in average, it can also lead to a longer loading time. It is the problem on the user part; nobody can do anything on this.

The direct replace on the text will not make your Chinese site have a good performance, and may present a bad image if it is not appropriately made. When goes deeper on the factors mentioned before, each website is different and there is no standard measure fits all sites, so is necessary to consult an experienced specialist for advice.

*Image is from CCTV