Companies that want to market to Chinese speakers must first decide on their target markets. Who are they trying to reach? But first let’s define some China SEO terms.

What is China SEO?

For the keyword China SEO there are a few meanings:

• Someone who wants find an SEO company to market to China
• Someone who wants to learn something about getting natural traffic from people who speak Chinese (This could include one or more of the following: China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and even small numbers of Chinese speakers in other countries)
• Someone who wants to work with a China SEO company for a variety of reasons. For example, if Chinese is your mother tongue it may be easier to launch a global SEO campaign working with people who understand you easily

A company outside of China looking for information or SEO China companies would be interested in search results which focused on the meanings from 1 and 2. Search results for number 3 would mostly be in Chinese. However the savvy Chinese company which wants to do a global campaign may search in English or other target countries to narrow results.

Baidu.com is the most popular search engine in China

What is Chinese SEO?

Chinese SEO is more specific than China SEO and one of the indicators of this is that there are fewer searches for Chinese SEO. The intents of these searchers can be:

• Someone looking for somebody to help with SEO, in the Simplified Chinese language, in order to target mainland China, Singapore and some Chinese expatriates
• Someone looking for somebody to help with SEO, in the Traditional Chinese language, in order to target people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and most Chinese expatriates

Simplified and Traditional Chinese use different characters for the same word so it is important not to make a mistake about this.
For example, if you were manufacturing chop sticks in Tel Aviv and you wanted to sell to restaurants in mainland China you would target this keyword in Simplified Chinese –特拉维夫筷子制造厂
If however you wanted to sell to companies in Hong Kong you would write in Traditional Chinese – 特拉維夫筷子製造廠

Is it best to use Hebrew / Arabic / Chinese or Latin characters in the URL? Here is an example of a URL with Hebrew and English mixed in as shown in a Google results page. It is nice that the URL keyword is bolded just like in English.

The only problem is that when you click on the link the URL in the address bar is OK for the English part Hebrew part is not something you are going to remember by heart.

In addition, if you click on the “Highlight all” button in the Firefox browser, the Hebrew in the SERPs gets split up as you can see below. This is probably because the URL is a mixture of right to left & left to right languages.

If you want people to memorize the specific URL of the page, Latin characters is the best way to go. If the specific URL is not important you can mix the languages as shown above. The home page part of the URL will still be readable.

Using URLs in Google Ads works, as you can see below. However the same problem exists with the resultant URL in the address bar.

Other options include transliterating the word–write how the word sounds in its native language using Latin letters. However the word will not bold up in the SERPs or ads because people don’t use this method to search. This is because they would get much poorer results (if at all) from the search engines.

In most cases I recommend using the local language or in the URL or at least the trailing end of it. This gives the person more of an idea what is on the page and results in bolded words in the SERPs. If branding the particular page is important then English or a transliteration should be considered.

For other opinions, check out the Search Engine Roundtable.