SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of making better use of digital content targeting specific keywords to increase the website’s visibility and organic traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Baidu. 

The ultimate goal of SEO can vary from increasing sales, promoting brands’ images and raising awareness, generating more leads, educating the audience, and so forth.

Mechanisms of SEO can be categorized into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to the ranking factors that the website owners can enhance by making changes such as creating fresh content and optimizing the headlines, meta description, subtitles, or web pages’ structure to comply with the search engine’s algorithm. 

The power of search engine optimization is that customers usually search for a keyword because they have a specific need. If your SEO strategy works appropriately on your website, you are generating traffic from your targeted customer group 24/7. It will no doubt give you enormous potential for increasing sales.

Hong Kong (Cantonese: 香港) is a “biliterate and trilingual” city in East Asia. 88.9% of Hong Kongers speak Cantonese in their daily life. The second most popular language is English (4.3%), followed by Other Chinese dialects (3.1% ), Mandarin / Putonghua (1.9%), and other languages (1.9%).

Both Chinese and English are the official languages in Hong Kong. Many people in the city are trilingual and speak Cantonese, Mandarin, and English.

As for the written Chinese language, most people use Traditional Chinese, while Mandarin speakers may use Simplified Chinese if they come from Mainland China.

Click here to learn more about the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin.

If you seek to maximize your website’s organic traffic, the primary language for your Hong Kong website must be Cantonese. As most Hong Kongers’ mother language is Cantonese, there is no doubt that Cantonese content will bring you the highest conversions in Hong Kong. 

On the other hand, English is a business language that people use in their work. Banks, governments, large enterprises, high-ended retailers, or businesses targeting professionals usually have a Hong Kong English website even though it is usually less engaging than the Cantonese one.

Depending on the content strategy and user experience considerations, companies can use either English, Cantonese, or both languages for their Hong Kong website. 

According to StatCounter, Google is the #1 search engine in Hong Kong, which occupies more than 90% of the market share. Other search engines that are used in the city include Yahoo! (6.94%), Bing (1.55%), Baidu (0.64%), DuckDuckGo (0.07%), and MSN (0.04%).

Therefore, it is evident that you should focus on Google to maximize the performance of your SEO and SEM campaigns.

Due to the limitation of the marketing budget, it’s uneasy for SMEs to compete with large companies in most advertisement channels. However, on the search engine battlefields, SMEs can continuously optimize their websites to the first page of Google with the right approach. And more importantly, it’s a relatively low-budget marketing funnel affordable for most SMEs.

The ultimate goal of localizing your website’s content in Cantonese is to make your conversion funnel work in the Hong Kong market.

The first step of localizing a website is translating all the content into the local language. Secondly, foreign businesses will have to proceed with localized SEO strategies like building local backlinks, getting listed on Google My Business and local yellow pages, gaining local media exposure, etc.

But a successful SEO localization strategy involves much more than translating a website’s content and making your content loved by Google’s algorithm. You will have to adapt the whole website into the cultural context, which requires consideration of languages, images, interface, social media channels, local competition, payment methods, local laws, business habits and much more. Reach out to me and learn more about setting up your local SEO strategy in Hong Kong.

A large or middle-size Hong Kong SEO company or digital agency consists of managers and junior marketers, sometimes even outsourcing their work to a third-party vendor. They are efficient in the division of labor, but you never know who is working on your project.

If you work with me, you work with a Hong Kong SEO freelance expert with a trackable record in achieving brand content marketing goals. As a freelancer, I focus on fewer projects simultaneously, so I can always pay attention to your need and maintain tight communication with you throughout the project.