Naver has biggiest share in korea search market
(1) Naver (2) Daum (3) Google Korea & Yahoo! Korea
While I’m dealing with Korean clients who are looking for expanding their sales to the world through internet, I meet lots of foreign clients who eagerly want their website or brand to be exposure to Korean web users. Each case has to focus on SEO discipline, but details would be completely different, because Korean search engine environment is dissimilar from others in lots of dimensions.
Koreans’ concept of search engine is different from worldwide’s, so does websites which they constantly visit. Koreans don’t know what twitter, delicious, linkedin are. Worldwide web users don’t know about café, Knowledge-in, DC inside as well. There are big gap between them.
Here are some of tips for you who are looking for right Korea SEO campaign.
Korea Dominant Search Engines – Naver & Daum
Ask worldwide web users. “What is the most popular search engine?” They would say “Google” or “Yahoo!” But when it comes to Korea, you may hardly hear of those names.
See the search volume share in Korea. Naver shares 74.47% of search engine market, and Daum(14.47%), Yahoo! Korea(4.04%), Google Korea (1.53%) follow it. While Naver dominates search engine market in Korea, Daum also takes important place in korea search engine environment. You can’t ignore it, because Daum has unique features(Agora, Bloger new, etc.) and loyal website members. But for today, I’ll focus on Naver (Click to read more about Daum).
What makes Naver so popular in Korea? What kind of service Korean web users want?
Korean would think of Naver not just as a search engine sites, but also as portal site which contains full of various contents and useful platforms. Koreans are used to search and stay just in one domain which contains lots of members and service so that they don’t have to go somewhere else. They love to be with majority. They think ‘The more people stay, the more information is there.
Following is some noticeable and popular platforms of Naver.
Knowledge iN(Answers)
It played main role to bring Naver’s initial popularity. Naver sets up “Knowledge iN” in 2002, enabling Koreans to help each other in a type of real-time question-and-answer platform. On average, 44,000 questions are posted each day with about 110,000 returned answers. Even Google has benchmarked it for making Question & Answers service in Russia.
Animated home page
Naver has more visual, more eye-catching home page. (more like yahoo! than google.)
<Home page of Naver>
Recently Google Korea is trying to follow Korean trend.
<Home page of Google.com> <Home page of Google.co.kr>
Integrated Search result
Naver’s organic search result and PPC result come from Yahoo!’s. (Daum’s comes from Google’s) Following is the Naver search result page of keyword ‘beef’.
When you enter keyword “beef” on search tab, you will see keyword advertising (CPC, CPM), blog, café, answers, news, organic result, shopping info, video, image, etc. all in 1 long page. Korean want to see all the information at a look and reach it quickly.
For successful SEO campaign, you should focus not just in ranking, but also impression in various verticals.
Well organized social media in Naver : Café & Blog
One of features of Korean web users is to voluntarily participate to write contents, make communities, ask questions and answer themselves by on purpose of commercial or interest. In Naver, you can easily make community(café) and blog. You may be not familiar with concept of Café. It is kind of community sites which have mambership account. Each individual web users can make their own cafe in Naver or Daum just like how they open blog. And they make some bulletin board, image board, comment board etc. to attract web users who have same interest. They become cafe members to share their knowledge, information, experience and more. (Example of Cafe)
Blog, Cafe & Answers’s performance in Korea search engine depends on title, description and popularity.
Korea SEO tip : SMO is just as important as Organic SEO.
As I mentioned, you can see lots of vertical in one page. It means your brand can be seen several times by users in various vertical. You have to make full use of it. Blog, Café, Knowledge In can make a difference. Put your effort in improving web visibility of those, while optimizaing organic search result and users interface in your website.
Well begun is half done. Now you know how Korean search engine works and Korean web users play, so ready to get started Korea SEO campaign.
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Good info sharing about Korean search engine. Naver is so popular in Korea, does anyone know who are the reputed SEO company that provides professional SEO service to rank on top of Naver?
go ahead and visit http://www.interad.com thx~