There are several factors involved in website optimization.
What makes a website great is not just the looks and fancy banners, but also the overall content and backend structure.
A well-optimized Chinese website, aside from the translation and localization of content, also includes SEO best practices such as site submission and correct integration of social media APIs.
READ MORE >>> When Should You Translate Your Website Into Chinese?
According to Common Sense Advisory via Harvard Business Review, they found out “72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language,” while “2.4% of consumers said they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language.”
Below are the best practices for web optimization, especially if you recently launched a Chinese website.
Chinese website optimization McDonald sample
- Webmaster tools are integrated into your website
Just like how English website works where Google webmaster tools are also installed at the backend, you also need to open a Baidu Webmaster account to access the features – everything is in Chinese – with the help of SEO specialists to interpret and analyze data.
Opening an account would also require a Chinese mobile number for the verification process. If you need help on this, our team can assist you.
- It’s submitted to the Baidu search engine
Do you want to know how to impress Baidu algorithms? According to Hermes Ma, a Search Engine Journal contributor and a digital marketer based in China, it’s best to start with a few pages but with robust, high-quality content per page. This gives Baidu an impression that you know how to organize content.
Because if you launch a new site with many pages but almost empty or duplicated content this will lead to a disastrous ending and it’s difficult to win Baidu’s trust.
As Ma put it, “If you fail to make a good “first impression,” Baidu then allocates fewer resources crawling your site in the future.”
To solve this problem, the SEO specialist or webmaster can disallow the website during the UAT (User Acceptance Test).
- The content is localization for your audience
While this is self-explanatory, which means it does require a professional translator to translate the texts, this also includes localization of layout if needed, and the nitty-gritty elements such as colors, the time and date format, keywords, meta descriptions, tags, and more.
For a comprehensive approach to localization, companies also translate their tagline in Chinese, tweak some the colors of the brand and ad copies to suit the preferences of the target audience. Banners and pop-ups are likely colorful and flashy, instead of a following the brand’s colors.
- The social media app APIs and local payment gateways are installed
One of the most important small, yet important website elements is the integration of social media API that will be easier for visitors to follow or opt-in using the local social media channels.
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and other mainstream social media accounts are not available and popular in China. WeChat and Weibo are the popular ones and Chinese visitors can easily follow you and engage with your brand through these channels.
For e-commerce websites, APIs are critical for the overall user experience especially for opt-ins, logging in, and payment transactions.
- Loads faster and mobile responsive
Mobile responsiveness should be a priority when it comes to content localization. The layout on the desktop is sure is different from what it looks like on mobile. There might be some elements on the mobile layout that you need to include or disregard based on your goals.
Page speed should be improved. Fortunately, Baidu offers MIP or Mobile Instant Pages that optimizes the website page loading speed. We also mentioned this in our previous post, 5 Things You Should Know About Baidu. What MIP does, it imports a page into the MIP server as a cache, resulting in an improved page weight when the visitor browses the mobile version.
