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Naver is a South Korean alternative to Google that is extremely popular and has a huge audience. Naver is actually the largest search engine in Korea, taking up approximately 60% of the market. This is why you should target Naver for your marketing campaigns in Korea.
Naver has a lot of paid products that it promotes from its site, meaning that those who use Naver often do so with the intent to spend money. They’re just the kind of audience you should be interested in!
So how do you stand out on Naver and reach this audience? These are the few things to keep in mind:
Naver Blog Management
If you want to become popular on Naver, there are a few things you need to do. The first and most important is to create your own Naver blog, which will be set up for you as soon as you apply for your Naver analytics account. This is important because it is one of the key factors Naver uses in its algorithm and C-Rank scoring. This stands for “Creator Rank” and refers to a score calculated on the basis of how much content you put out on its own channels. One of the most important of these is your Naver blog.
If you create content on your Naver blog and that brand is tied to your main blog or website, then Naver can see whether that content is performing well, whether it is accurate, whether it is popular with visitors, etc. All this information can then be collected and used to determine whether or not your site should be promoted.
In other words, this is a powerful way that Naver can monitor the quality of your content and your engagement – and it just so happens that it also benefits Naver by providing the portal with bespoke content that it can use to keep people on its page.
This is a key factor to remember: even more so than Google, Naver wants to keep people engaged with its own site. It has its own products, and this is the primary way it makes money. The more you can do to keep your audience engaged with Naver’s products, the more successful you’ll be.
Writing Great Naver Blog Content
What Naver wants to see from your blog is that it is engaging its audience and keeping people on the page. Therefore, you need to ask primarily what it is you can do to keep people interested in your content. This comes down largely to your writing style.
Naver’s blog content is a lot more casual, conversational, and less technical than any blogs on the English side of the internet. The point is that you’re not writing to get good grades anymore, you’re writing to entertain and to engage. This means that you should be trying to write largely the way people talk, so if you would naturally pause before the and, you’ll only improve your article by putting the comma in there.
Here your goals are going to be very different, so rather than trying to show off how well you can write technically, you are trying to convey information and ideas in a way that is engaging and immediately eye-catching.
Think brand engagement
A long introduction for instance might be great from a structure point of view, but it could also risk alienating your readers and putting them off reading the whole thing. People online are often in a hurry. Your goal then is to quickly make your point – no matter if that means occasionally defying convention. This is especially important if you want to show Naver that your content has the ability to engage and hold a reader’s attention.
Just as important is to provide information that is genuinely new and interesting. Too many people will create generic content with the hope of appealing to everyone. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, try to appeal to a specific demographic and target audience – make sure you have something unique to say, and that you are genuinely passionate about the topic. Otherwise, it will come across.
Naver Blog Reviews
Another way to drive more traffic to your Naver Blog and/or website is to get bloggers to review your product or service with a Call-To-Action (CTA) linking back to your desired page. You want to find blogs that have at least 100+ visitors per day.
At Inquivix, we find “Power Bloggers” who have at least 1,000 visitors per day. Working with Power Bloggers will help you get your desired content ranked faster because these bloggers have highly optimized blogs. You will gain more impressions from Power Blog Reviews than posting on your new Naver Blog. Naver SEO, like any SEO, takes time.
Check our Naver Blog:
Getting the first button in your digital marketing strategy is important
[Inquivix] “Honest and Right Digital Marketing Agency”
What is social media marketing?
Naver’s Other Products
Naver has a number of other products. These include Naver Encyclopedia (think Wikipedia), Knowledge iN (think Quora), and Naver Café (think Reddit). These tools further help to keep users engaged with Naver, while providing you with more ways to send signals about the importance of your brand and business.
Creating a brand page for your business on Naver Encyclopedia should be one of the very first things you do for instance. This will help to establish you as a real business – which is something that Naver is very keen for creators to demonstrate.
Likewise, you should spend time answering questions on Knowledge iN and interacting with the community at Naver Café. Again, all you can do to add content to Naver’s platform and to engage people with your brand will result in your Naver blog and your actual website benefiting.
READ MORE:
Social Media Marketing in South Korea – A Guide
What Internet Marketers Need to Know about Advertising on Naver
Naver: Digital Marketing in South Korea
On-Page Optimization
For your “real blog” there are a few additional things you can do to gain more exposure and better rankings.
One key thing is to think about your page optimization. Really important is that your page is mobile-friendly, that it is easily crawlable, and that it loads quickly. These factors contribute to Naver’s so-called “P-Rank” which is designed to ensure a high-quality web page. This is in a bid to compete with Google and other search engines.
Also, very crucial is structured data and rich snippets. Remember how Naver likes to keep users right on its own site? By pulling information from your pages and showing these as knowledge graphs and highlights, this is another strategy Naver can use to offer everything all-in-one place. If you aren’t already using markups to help bots to find their way around your content – now is the time to do that.
Rich snippets essentially work by allowing you to highlight specific features in your text. This might mean showing where you have shared a recipe for example, or it might mean showing the rating you have given a product during a review.
Any of these things can then answer the user’s intent during a search. Does that mean they won’t click on your link? Potentially – but unfortunately if you don’t play ball, then another site will simply get that engagement instead!
Naver Search Ads (PPC)
Finally, you might consider the role of Naver paid advertising (PPC). Naver places a lot of paid advertising above its organic results, meaning that this is a great way to get seen by more customers. We wrote a whole blog post on how to use Naver advertising, so you can check that out here.
This can also help to send positive signals to Naver. In short, you need to think less in terms of algorithm, and more in terms of Naver as a platform. Remember that this is a portal with somewhat curated content, advertising, and more. Treat it that way, and your blog will grow along with your brand.
Naver Ads has an ad type, specifically for your blog content, called “Power Content”. Power Content works similar to “Power Links” (Naver Search Ads) except that the final link is for a specific blog post on your Naver Blog. This is a great way to drive more traffic to your Naver Blog, especially in the early stages of your blog when it’s difficult to gain traction.
If you continue to post valuable content with SEO in mind and practice a few of the strategies outlined in this post, you will start getting your posts ranked for your keywords in no time.