European SEO thinking assumes a single index that most people query. In China attention is split across search engines, marketplaces and closed app ecosystems, and each has its own rules.
What Baidu rewards differently
- Content genuinely written in Chinese, not translated. Machine translation is detectable and it costs you.
- Hosting and loading speed inside the country, which is why the ICP question comes back around.
- Simplified characters and the vocabulary your buyers actually type — often not the textbook term.
- Baidu's own properties, which occupy a great deal of the first page.
The part that surprises people
A serious share of commercial discovery happens inside apps: search on a marketplace, search inside WeChat, recommendation feeds. None of that appears in a web crawl, and none of it is reachable by optimising a European site. Being findable in China is less about ranking and more about being present where the search happens.
Before investing in Baidu SEO, check the simpler thing: whether your site loads at all from the mainland. Ranking a page nobody can open is an expensive way to learn that lesson.