In recent years, you can find that China is growing rapidly. According to some statistical reports, the number of internet users in China has increased with a double-digit percentage from year to year. And the average number of hours being spent on the internet has increased to 18 per week. This clearly shows that China is getting more and more influential on the internet. However, a lot of people have found that there is great censorship being conducted in this internet world.
Due to some social issues, the Chinese government has adopted straight internet censorship. This form of Chinese internet censorship has created problems for businesses to enter Chinese market indeed. Even Google had encountered difficulties in positioning itself in China and considered to quit the market. Therefore, you should pay attention to some techniques that you should apply in order to conduct SEO in China effectively.
In recent years, Chinese authority is working hard to eliminate the website which would have too much sex appeal. Therefore, you should not try to use some sexy images to do the SEO work for your website. The local search engines such as Baidu would have a straight control over this form of SEO technique and they would not rank your website at a high position in the results page if you try to use this kind of technique to promote your website.
Since the government wants to emphasize the harmony in the society, businesses can consider using this as the central theme of the SEO work. They can consider using some keywords to show that this website is matching the social harmony and this can let the website pass the control or the censorship. However, businesses should also be aware of the fact that some Chinese citizens are fed up with the message of ‘harmony’. This means that they, as the final consumer, may not like that business website. Therefore, a great challenge for the businesses in China is to balance between the censorship and the satisfaction of customers needs.
Some of the businesses would try to employ Chinese local consultants to help them design the keywords and the promotional tactics so that they can target Chinese citizens more. This is possible if you really want to have a firm base of customers in China in long run.
To conclude, there are both opportunities and threats raised from the China internet censorship. With the control over the content in the internet world, you can see that harmful or negative messages about a business would not flow online easily. In other words, your business would not be intentionally harmed online. But you have to pay attention to the rules that the local Chinese search engine would apply in ranking the websites. If you do not follow this kind of rules, the work of SEO may be wasted. Therefore, altering the SEO techniques to suit Chinese search engine may be necessary and this is something that successful businesses would do in order to attract Chinese customers.
