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by Manon Im on Jun 8, 2022 9:00:00 AM
Contents
- How to Build Your SEO Strategy
- Important things to consider
- NAVER Products and Services to Enhance Your SEO Strategy
- NAVER SEO
- Let NAVER SEO Supercharge Your Korean Site
South Korea is one of the leading countries in digitalization, with an internet adoption rate of over 82% and an astounding 99.3% wireless broadband penetration.
The country also has an active eCommerce market, with the average citizen spending around 30-minutes browsing online retailers every day.
To succeed in digital marketing in South Korea, You need to know what NAVER is. NAVER is South Korea’s most popular search engine, superseding the use of Google.
As of 2022, NAVER has a 65% market share in search queries. Marketers need to focus on this platform to get the best results with their South Korean marketing strategy.
As with any search engine, NAVER requires marketers to launch an SEO strategy encompassing on-page and off-page tactics to improve their ranking in search.
Let’s unpack everything you need to know about NAVER SEO.
1. How to Build Your SEO Strategy
As with any other website, marketers must optimize their website and its offering to rank on NAVER. Then what do marketers need to consider to build a NAVER SEO strategy that delivers results? Here are some of the proven tactics that help you rank on NAVER.
1) SERPs
Optimizing your site and web pages using on-page and off-page techniques gives you the best chance of your content and web pages appearing in multiple SERP results.
2) Submit Your Site To NAVER
To rank in NAVER’s SEO/search results, marketers must submit their site to NAVER for review at https://submit.NAVER.com.
Failing to register your site with NAVER means you don’t have any guarantee that the search bots will crawl your site, index, and rank your content.
Typically, you can expect the admin team at NAVER to take up to two weeks to review your submission. The submission form is also in the Korean language, and you’ll need a native SEO service provider to help you complete the registration process.
3) Keep It Native
NAVER is a native platform to South Korea. The search engine is only available in Korean, with no option for an English version of the site.
When targeting the Korean consumer market, all your web content must be in the Korean language.
The language barrier is real, and publishing content in English results in much lower engagement level with your content and, of course, a huge failure of your content strategy.
4) Keyword and Meta Data Optimization
Meta content on your web pages makes it easier for the NAVER web crawler to determine the quality and information of the content on your web pages.
After assessing your metadata, the NAVER search bots rank it for search queries based on the usefulness of the content to its search inquiries.
All your web pages on NAVER must feature SEO elements like title tags, keyword tags, and meta descriptions. Tags and meta descriptions help you optimize metadata and tags to improve your ranking in NAVER search.
Like all search engines, NAVER penalizes you for keyword-stuffing, so avoid over-optimization of your content.
5) Content Quality
Similar to Google, NAVER emphasizes high-quality content. Your content strategy needs to provide value to your readers. Too many marketers try to write articles for the search engines, not their audience.
NAVER penalizes you for this practice by ranking you lower in search results. To get the best ranking possible, you must publish rich, engaging content with information which is useful and on-point for readers.
2. Important things to consider
NAVER also considers the following factors when ranking your website and web pages.
- Your click-through rate (CTR)
- Link quality
- The relevance of your targeted keywords
- The freshness of the content you publish
- NAVER account registration for your off-page SEO strategy
Like Google, NAVER boosts ranking for websites using its products. To gain access to NAVER services, you’ll need to complete account registration.
Then you can start using NAVER products like NAVER Café, NAVER Blog, NAVER Knowledge, and NAVER Encyclopedia.
3. NAVER Products and Services to Enhance Your SEO Strategy
1) Naver Knowledge Snippet
NAVER Encyclopedia brings you a service that’s similar to Wikipedia. Publishing a page that includes your business information and website could appeal to your potential customer in Korea with high credibility.
This practice helps you appear in the NAVER Encyclopedia snippet of search results, just like wikipedia snippet in Google. NAVER Encyclopedia business pages need to include a description of your company, an image of your logo, and a link to your site.
NAVER also includes useful information for searchers, such as product details and service you offer, as well as your company history and sector information.
It’s important to note that while NAVER provides a link to your site, it doesn’t include the option for inserting hyperlinks into text. Therefore, you’ll need to populate your description with your top keywords.
2) NAVER Café
NAVER Café Home
This social tool is an important community feature of the platform. You have the option of joining different Cafés, providing searchers with relevant topic information, and you can share ideas with other users on the forum.
Source: NAVER
Due to the influence of the COVID-19, the demand for online community platform activities increases. Accordingly, users and activities of NAVER Cafe, the largest online community platform in Korea, are increasing significantly again as demand for online community activities increases.
The number of weekly active users (WAU) of NAVER Café is increasing every year from 16 million in 2018 to 18 million in 2019, 19 million in 2020, and 21 million in 2021.
Monthly active users (MAU) are also steadily increasing to 23 million in 2018, 25 million in 2019, 26 million in 2020, and 28 million in 2021.
Launching a NAVER Café for your brand lets you interact with South Korean users, allowing you to support your prospects and communities. You can network with potential customers, fans of your brands through your Café. You might also want to partner with a Café that has an relevant audience to your brand to reach out to them.
Ensure your account remains active by publishing top-shelf content regularly. You also have the option of offering incentives like sweepstakes, giveaways, and voucher promotions to fill your prospect pipelines and sales funnels.
As with other search engines, NAVER prioritizes accounts that get engagement from their target market. It views this engagement as a sign that you’re producing relevant, fresh content that people want to see – boosting your ranking in search. Encourage shares, likes, and comments for all your content using CTAs.
The more community members you have in your café, the better your content ranks on NAVER search. NAVER views a large community in your café as a sign that you have an influential brand people want to know about, and you start ranking higher in SERPs.
3) NAVER Blog
When you open your NAVER account, the platform automatically creates a blog for you. Blogging is an essential marketing tool for driving qualified traffic to your site. Your blog allows you to boost the results of your SEO campaigns, allowing you to express opinions, promote brands, websites, services, and products.
With the NAVER blog, web admins can connect with their target market. Use your NAVER blog to deliver high-quality content suitable for consumption by your target audience.
4) NAVER Knowledge
This interactive Q&A forum has a similar look to Yahoo! Answers. Users can ask questions about your company, products, and services, receiving answers from other users about their experience using your company.
NAVER Knowledge is a popular tool in South Korea. Currently, there are more than 80-million web pages of user-driven content featuring as Q&A material.
Engage with your target market on NAVER Knowledge, answering questions about your suite, products, and services to gain brand awareness and trust in the South Korean consumer market.
Improve your SEO and ranking by optimizing your reply’s using your top-ranking keywords and keyword phrases.
4. NAVER SEO
1) The Role of Mobile Optimization
South Korea is one of the world’s largest mobile internet markets. An unoptimized site ends up with you leaving money on the table. With the world’s highest mobile internet penetration, NAVER emphasizes mobile-friendly websites and pages.
NAVER will penalize sites that don’t have mobile optimization. Therefore, it’s critical to ensure that your web pages feature mobile-compatible templates for better ranking in search.
2) NAVER SEO Checklist and Strategy
When you’re ready to start with NAVER, use this checklist to ensure you correctly set up your account.
- Submit your site to the NAVER team.
- Ensure all your content is in the South Korean language.
- Optimize your content for your keywords and metadata.
- Ensure you only publish high-quality content.
- Use the NAVER suite of products to improve your ranking.
- Optimize your website for mobile compatibility.
It’s important to note that you need to optimize your site for fast loading. South Korea has one of the best wireless broadband infrastructures globally, and slow loading times will damage your ranking in search.
5. Let NAVER SEO Supercharge Your South Korean Site
If you want to boost your local SEO ranking in the South Korean market, it’s essential to register your site with NAVER. You’ll need to work with a talented team that understands the platform to your advantage.
Your SEO partner must know how to utilize NAVER products and services, like NAVER Café, to your advantage.
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