Why is WeChat more effective than Baidu SEO and a Chinese website?

In this article, we give you some background information about Baidu (and other similar search engines in China) and we focus on some key points to increase your visibility in China. 

Baidu is the most important search engine in China, with about 79% market share in China, followed by Bing (9%), Sogou (4%) and a few other smaller search engines. The functionalities for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Advertising (SEA) are similar to Google SEO and SEA, and most of the commonly used marketing practices in Western markets can also be used for Baidu.

However, there are certain characteristics and features which are specific for China and which make Baidu less economical for foreign B2B-companies:

• Chinese people don’t use Baidu like we use Google. Although Baidu is the biggest search engine in China, many Chinese people do not use Baidu when they search for information or companies on internet. China is a ‘mobile-first’ society, which means that Chinese people use their smartphones when they look for products or brands. Furthermore, instead of Baidu, most Chinese search on Chinese social media apps directly, such as WeChat, Weibo, Little Red Book, Douyin, or in e-commerce platforms, such as Alibaba, JD.com, etc. This also includes searches for B2B products.
• Even if you have a Chinese-language website, no Chinese will find your website. Due to certain technical differences or limitations (such as a different crawl frequency, Baidu not supporting JavaScript, the ‘Great Firewall of China’ and censorship rules, etc.), Chinese people will never find your website, unless they know your domain name. And even if they find your Chinese website, usually foreign-hosted websites rank very poorly in Baidu ranking and will load more slowly, deteriorating the user experience.
• You need an ICP-license. A solution for the above problems could be to host your website in Mainland China. To open a website in Mainland China, you need an ICP-license (ICP = Internet Content Publishing License). However, you need your own legal entity in China to get an ICP-license (it cannot be done by a third party). Many of our customers don’t have a legal entity in China yet, some of them even don’t have the intention to set up a legal entity in the first place.
• Other solutions are possible, but not economical. There are ways to circumvent the above issues, such as hosting your website in Hong Kong or using a CDN (‘Content Delivery Network’), but these solutions usually still not offer major improvement, unless a lot of investment is done.

As a consequence, based on our experience with similar B2B projects, if you need to set priorities (which 99% of our customers must do), we strongly recommend focusing on WeChat as your main marketing & communication tool in China. For B2B companies, in the Western world a website is the centre of all your marketing and communication efforts; in China this is WeChat. The return on investment will definitely be higher, apart from other advantages, as described in the next paragraph.

WeChat as your window to China

WeChat, called 微信 (‘Weixin’) in Chinese, is owned by Tencent and originally started as a messaging app in 2011. In 2023 WeChat had 1,26 billion monthly active users and was China’s most popular app. In the past decade it developed into a unique ‘super-app’. Most Chinese people use WeChat both for private and business. There is no single western app or platform that can be compared with WeChat. Please check for more information about this at the following link.

Apart from using WeChat as a one-to-one communication tool or for other applications in China, a company or organization can also set up a WeChat official account. There are 2 types of enterprise accounts (or official accounts): service accounts and subscription accounts.

• Service accounts appear in the WeChat inbox, just like any incoming message (from a friend or colleague). As a result, service accounts offer great visibility. With a service account you are able to post a maximum of 4 posts per month (with up to 8 articles per post). Most of our B2B customers set up a Service Account.
• Subscription accounts are grouped in a folder called ‘subscriptions’, so it needs one additional step to see the posts, which results in less visibility for your followers. On the other hand, a subscription account can post daily (1 post per day, up to 6 articles per post).

By the way, did you know that we recently published a WeChat guide, completely free of charge? Please check the following article and share your contact details with us.

Contact us if you want to know more about creating digital visibility in China or when you are planning to set up a WeChat official account for your business in China.