Use Baidu Index for Chinese Keyword Research

Posted by Ryan on 2011-01-07

Update on 2012-03-14: if you are interested in Chinese keyword research, we have a new post on the topic that covers more Chinese keyword research tools: The Comprehensive List of Chinese Keyword Research Tools.

To Chinese SEOs, when doing a keyword research, Baidu Index is definitely your weapon of mass destruction.

Although there are quite a number of famous keyword tools out there, such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, etc, it seems they don’t read and speak Chinese (well). So today I am going to share with you some basics about Baidu Index and how to use it for Chinese keyword research.

1. User Interest Trend and Media Interest Trend (I took the keyword “android” as example.)

Baidu Index - Interest Trend

The interest trend is the most important part, which reveals the public and media interest trend for a certain keyword. In our case, the keyword I chose is “Android”. We can see the public interest trend number is amazing high for “Android”. One thing – the number doesn’t mean the real daily search volume, although it is larger than 100, which Google Insight takes as default. According to our latest test, the real search volume is 1.6 times larger than the public interest number.

2. Trend Growth and In the News

Baidu Index Trend Growth and In the News

This part of the result page indicates the interest growth over time and news related to the keyword.

  1. Related Keywords

Baidu Index - Keyword Suggestion

This part shows the related searches of the target keywords, using a yellow bar to indicate the relevancy of each suggestion. This part is also of high value to Chinese SEOs because it can work as a perfect keyword suggestion tool.

4. Rising Searches

Baidu Index - Rising Searches

Rising keywords, another good keyword suggestion source.

  1. Map and Region

Baidu Index - Map and Region

Baidu Index - Cities and Provinces

Revealing the regional popularity of certain keywords, valuable to location based services. You also need to pay attention to this part if you are targeting a “location + product/service” phrase.

6. User Information – Gender, Age, Industry and Education

Baidu Index - Gender and Age

Baidu Index - Industry and Education

We can see Baidu Index offers a picture with very detailed information about a certain keyword, which is of great value for keyword research. Besides what is mentioned above, there are still plenty of gold mines for us to dig within the result, such as using the general interest trend for a product or service for market prediction.

Related posts:

baidu seo guide

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