Dynamics of Marketing and SEO in Hong Kong: Demographics, Languages and Search Engines

When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), the most common image is about Google – Whether the business is a small business with local audience or a Hong Kong based online shop targeting the HK market, it is about ranking the business website or the ecommerce site high up Google’s organic search results pages. However, SEO in Hong Kong may be different as people who live in Hong Kong use at least two search engines (i.e. Google and Yahoo). About a decade ago, Yahoo was having at least 50% market share in search, and Google cane only second. Nowadays the over market share in HK has changed to Google’s favor with over 65% market share. Yahoo is still one search engine that SEO professionals and online marketers should not have missed because of its audience size.

A SEO company in Hong Kong would have been able to varied above and the following information. Hong Kong is a city which has audience who are bilingual (if not multilingual). In terms of marketing in general, you will see banner ads in Chinese traditional language (that tends towards a Cantonese tone), and ads with English language only. After all, HK has long been an international hub where the west culture meets the east culture. Having multiple languages is one aspect to keep in mind when developing and launching any marketing campaign.

There are still a large percentage of Hong Kong consumers who would have search on either search engines i.e. Yahoo or Google for a particular product and check the prices of a product on different online stores. But the same audience may tend to visit the physical local stores afterwards to see the real product. When people end up buying the particular product in the physical store instead of placing the product in the online shopping cart or completing the purchase through the online checkout process, it is rather hard for marketers to track what could have happened or to attribute the performance to a traffic source (such as SEO or an online ad).

With the common practice of searching online and buying offline, many searches aren’t originated from the traditional device i.e. a desktop computer. Many of the search queries that concern the particular product would have been generated from mobile or tablet devices. One most important strategy is to develop a mobile responsive and search engine friendly website for the audience who may bee looking for your product through smartphones.

Justin Author