MSD Manuals
On-site and Off-site Baidu SEO
Since its publication in 1899, the MSD manual has been one of the world’s most widely used medical information resources. Created by Merck and Co., Inc, in Kenilworth, New Jersey, the MSD Manual is popular because it covers various medical topics across every aspect of medicine. MSD manuals get offered as free public service medical manuals to the general public and medical professionals.
There were two main ways that we planned on achieving this goal. These two actions aimed to help improve the website’s performance on Chinese search engines while offering more information for existing and future customers to digest and interact with.
What We Did
What We did
Our aim when linking up with MSD was to help develop their brand awareness and bring more visibility to this exciting company and product, to bring more traffic to the company website. There were two main ways that we planned on achieving this goal: Baidu SEO Starter Pack and Baidu SEO Campaigns, including Content Marketing and Backlinks.
SEO Starter Pack
The first aspect that we started focusing on was the SEO starter pack. We needed to ensure that the whole website was optimized and up to scratch so that it complied with what Chinese search engines deemed a great website. This action would ensure that our domain rating improved and provided us with much more opportunity to produce content that ranked on the first search page. Here’s how we did it:
- A full technical and SEO audit of the Chinese website, identifying all potential blocking points on the site. This stage also included a complete crawl of the site and deep, detailed, manual analysis. This manual analysis was our starting point for identifying where MSD’s current SEO level was and helped us understand the task at hand in greater detail.
- Backlink, keyword, and competitor analysis. Once the current SEO level got established, it was time to do backlink, keyword, and competitor analysis. These steps allowed us to identify valuable backlinks and important keywords and understand what MSD’s competitors were doing well and where we could beat them. This step highlighted some easy quick-wins we could execute and plenty of longer-term goals.
- On-site analysis. This step included page indexing, status, internal structure, duplicate content, robots.txt, .HTACCESS file, URL Rewriting, sitemap, meta tag, image alt and heading tag, implementation of Baidu analytics tracking code. These actions were essential to improve our domain rating and our chances of ranking MSD’s content.
- Technical elements analysis. This step included analyzing and improving the website loading time, pagination, and mobile compatibility, as well as assessing dynamic pages compared to static pages.
- Next, we provided strategic recommendations on how the site should be structured and improving the web semantics of internal pages.
- Once that was in place, we created a strategy for the MSD monthly campaign.
SEO Monthly Retainer
The main focus of the SEO monthly retainer was how we could improve traffic through on-site and off-site methods. We identified these two key pillars for success with MSD’s plan.
- On-site: To improve traffic via on-site means, we conducted frequent traffic analysis, looked at more effective positioning, and used a range of acquisition channels. On top of that, we executed keyword ranking analysis, indexation, and regular crawls. These actions were documented, analyzed, and provided to MSD in a monthly report, highlighting recommendations of action that could lead to more success.
- Off-site: From an off-site perspective, we used the information we gained from our competitors, keyword analysis, search trends, and backlink strategies to write articles that would go on to get published on a range of forums and key platforms such as Tieba, Baidu, Zhidao, and Zhihu.
Results from 2020 until now
Implementing this approach from different angles led to widespread message coverage, a significant uptick in sessions on the MSD website, and many more users overall.
+145%
+300%
Organic Sessions
+345%
Users
+161%
44+
Keywords in Top 5O
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Content Marketing
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