The first factor that will give you a ranking boost on Baidu is hosting your website on a server in Mainland China. If your web hosting server is located outside of China, it will most certainly be very slow or even unavailable to Chinese users.

Only Chinese web hosting companies are allowed to host data on servers in Mainland China. Therefore, you won’t be able to use your current web host, and you’ll need to choose a Chinese company to be your hosting provider.  

Best practices: If you’re having an international website and you’re seriously looking to increase your rankings on Baidu, you should consider moving only the Chinese version of your website to a Chinese web host.

An alternative, cheaper, and faster option is to host the Chinese version of your website on a server in HongKong or Taiwan.

Everything depends on how aggressive is your online strategy on the Chinese market.  

The most popular hosting companies in China are Aliyun and HiChina.

Having an ICP License

In order to be allowed to host a website on a Chinese server, you’ll need a special authorization called an Internet Content Publishing (ICP) License.

The ICP license (or 备案) is basically a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (中华人民共和国工业和信息化部) that is needed to operate a website in mainland China. According to Chinese law, all websites must clearly display the ICP number on their homepage.

If hosted in China and without an ICP license, your site can be taken down anytime: the Ministry can instruct your Chinese host to take the site down if its registration doesn’t appear in the ICP database.

There are two types if ICP license:

In my experience, the rules regarding the exact type of ICP license your website would need are not that strict, and I’ve seen commercial websites applying and operating under an ICP personal record without a problem.

In order to apply for an ICP license though, you’ll need a Chinese ID card (for the individual license) or a Chinese company license (to apply for the business license).

If your company doesn’t have a physical entity, nor an official business representative in China, you can use the services of a third-party company who will apply for an ICP license under their own business license.

The average price for such a service is around 200 – 300 USD.

Using .CN domain name

Another important difference between Google and Baidu is the domain name.

Baidu is known to give a ranking boost to websites that are hosted on .CN domain (China’s country code). This doesn’t mean that you can only use .cn domains. You can see many .com or even .net domains ranking well in the SERPs, but in general, a .cn domain will help you to rank faster and many case studies show that Baidu strongly favors the .CN domain names. If however, for some reason, a .cn domain is not possible for you, .com and .net are also options.

A physical address in China

Displaying a physical company address in China may also improve the visibility of your website. It gives legibility to your business in China.