At AAC 2013, I covered basic to intermediate SEO techniques for the search engines, Baidu and Naver. With Baidu having the majority market share in China and Naver dominating the South Korean they have become key areas in Asian search. The Asian market is becoming more and more enticing as the western space becomes increasingly saturated and diversification becomes more and more essential to create a stable business model through search.
iGB has kindly allowed me to share the sound files and the slideshow from my presentation on marketing to South Korea and China (see files below).
Courtesy of Pokerstars.com
Now, Baidu is obviously off limits which rules out China as an option, unless you use Weibo, there’s more about that in the presentation. Taiwan becomes an interesting market to explore in terms of poker, and Taiwan has a Google-based search market, making it a little bit more familiar and a little less daunting.
It should be noted that PPC is not an option due to legalities in terms of advertising.
Getting Chinese translation done can be pretty cheap as well, especially if you look to have it done by foreign students at your local university looking to make some quick cash. And in most cases the quality will be of a high standard.
As a rule of thumb, getting around 50 landing pages translated and seeing where they sit after a few weeks of being indexed should give you some indication as to whether or not you should proceed. Eventually, it will be worth redesigning these landing pages to fit. But, most affiliates are going to see this market as a “punt.” As such, a low-risk strategy would be ideal.
About Mike Litson
Mike Litson has been in SEO for several years and specializes in competitive markets predominantly Gambling and Financial Trading. Mike currently heads up the Blueclaw iGaming and affiliate department.