Chris Shin, founder of Digital Asset Directors, explains how to rank in Naver, South Korea's dominant search engine. Naver uses different ranking systems than Google, including C-Rank and P-Rank, and heavily favors Naver Blog and Naver Cafe. Traffic and backlinks from local Naver properties matter more than traditional SEO signals.
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Today I bring you another very special edition of Crawling Mondays. This is about Naver SEO with Chris Shin, who's one of the top specialists in South Korea. He's going to share with us how people search out there, how he does to optimize for them using Naver. Let's take a look. Hi, my name is Christopher Shin.
I grew up in the States and educated in the States, and I've been doing SEO for quite some time. And primarily, I'm more veteran in, you know, Google SEO. And about 4 years back, I found an opportunity to do some SEO work in the South Korean market, and I brought myself out about 4 years, slightly 4 and a half years ago, and started my own agency. My agency is called Digital Asset Directors. Started with nothing and now we've grown to more than 20 SEO professionals and we now do more than $1.7 million in annual billings. So there's 2 major players within the search market for the South Korean market. The first one is Naver. Surprisingly, a lot of people would think that Daum, which is the other search portal in South Korea, would be number 2 at least. But lo and behold, Google has slowly scooped its way up. Now they're at the point where Google is doing about, you know, 30-40% of market share, and Naver has lost quite their touch in search engine share in the market.
What is the share at this point of Naver?
A lot of people are estimating it's about 60-40 split. On a conservative level, 70/30, but Google has strongly come up. Surprisingly, Naver has lost a lot of millennials and Gen Z audiences, and it's not Google, they lost it to YouTube. So YouTube is now taking part as a search engine. What these younger guys are doing is they're actually going online searching for videos. That way they don't have to actually read anything but actually view video content. To get their answers. So when you ask, you know, how people actually use each of these search platforms, and I'm gonna include YouTube as a search platform because a lot of people are searching on that video platform. A lot of people tend to use Naver for local, you know, restaurants or, you know, places to eat, things of that nature, a lot less for any informational type of search. Google is the go-to place for any research-related searches or something that they have a question to, they need specific answers to. But the younger audiences, again, they're kind of like jumped over to YouTube to find answers. So if they want to do something like, I don't know, how do you make a fried egg? You know, they jump right into YouTube and just watch the video and consume information that way.
Most of this usage of search is Mobile or desktop still?
It's dominantly mobile. It's about 70/30 split. But based on the clients that I run, in terms of the actual conversions within, you know, digital sense, I see PC still having some edge, sometimes running up into the 60% versus mobile. But it's generally about 50% PC, 50% mobile in terms of purchase behaviors. But the search in general itself is about 70-80% Towards mobile. So there's quite a difference between Google's SERP as opposed to Naver. For Naver, almost always the first priority is going to be focused on the paid search side of things. So you'll almost get anywhere from 4 to 5 search paid links, and on the bottom you can even get like 5, 10 more. It's just a huge list. So that's almost always going to be the first section. The second section is then going to be about their blog, so their own products, which is going to be Neighbor Blog, Neighbor Cafe. Then comes the news section. So the organic is pretty much way at the bottom and it's quite hard to find. So in terms of the click-through rate, where most of the clicks are arising from, and I've tested this with various clients, most of the clicks are coming in from Neighbor Cafes, then Neighbor Blogs. The reason why Neighbor Blog has kind of pushed out as opposed to neighborhood cafes is that I think people are having a lot less trust with neighborhood blogs because there's been many instances where agencies are using click farms to drive fake clicks just to increase their rankings. And so a lot of people are kind of like, you know, trusting towards neighborhood cafes, but at the same time, for like branded terms, One of the most important things that a lot of foreigners don't know about is that for major branded keywords, and I'm talking about brands such as Coca-Cola, they would always hit number 1. And when I say number 1, they would hit anything number 1 as in above all advertising and anything Naver-related. So Naver is actually set up into 3 group sets of algorithms. The first one is C-Rank, which stands for Creator Rank, and it's more focused on their internal products, which is cafes and blogs. Their second major algorithm groupset is called P-Rank, which is kind of like a copy of this thing called PageRank, you know, off of Larry Page. But it's not really meant as Larry Page's PageRank. It's more of PageRank as in, you know, their ranking within pages. So they have a different understanding of what PageRank is. The third is this new algorithm. They launched it early last year. It's called DIA. It stands for Deep Intent Analysis. So it's kind of like trying to get into that whole LSI stuff, semantic search, trying to get a better understanding of the actual intention of each specific keyword. To give you a bit more elaborative description of what PageRank is, P-Rank, which is more so for organic ranking, is basically traffic to the website. You know, how much people are going to the website. And you'll see a lot of Korean companies unknowingly use click farms run by agencies to kind of like increase their ranking. So the traffic is the number one, I think. Well, not at least number one, but it's up there with the key algorithms. Number 2 is number of backlinks, and you get a lot more boost if the backlinks are coming in from neighbors' own properties. When I say neighbors' own properties, I'm talking about neighbor cafes, neighbor blogs, anything that has to do with neighbors. If you put a link, backlink on there, it's treated more favorably. Other ranking factors that I did find out was just pretty much the basics, and you'll pretty much rank. Especially when you start working keywords within the descriptions, meta descriptions, meta titles. When it comes to content matching, it's not as sophisticated as Google's, but, you know, does that mean that, oh, I can just manipulate the system and rank number 1? No, not really. There's a lot more to that, but, you know, those are the key signals that I found to be true.
One question, are these signals true only for the organic results or also to rank the neighbor They're slightly different.
When it comes to blogs, it's number of registered users. You know, they also take into consideration for Naver blogs the type of reviews, number of reviews, and how many people actually like the blog. So that's basically the C-rank algorithm based on popularity.
So does having a Korean ccTLD play a ranking factor in Korea?
I personally believe so because, you know, the Korean Naver platform is actually based on the Korean language, so they prefers their native settings, which is co.kr.
And the rest of the technical configurations on the homepage technical configuration, do they work in the same way than Google? Like, for example, does Naver respect the configuration on our robots.txt?
So yes, they do respect robots.txt files. They also request you to upload sitemaps. Canonical, yes, they respect that.
Meta robots?
Meta robots, everything. So they actually ask you to do that stuff. The very first, you know, obvious approach that we need to address is the keyword R&D. So, you know, I've tried various tools that's available overseas such as Ahrefs, Semrush, etc., etc. But what I did find to be the most useful tool for us is using Naver Keyword Tools. So that's a free tool that you can have access to as long as you have a paid advertising account on Naver. We then start— need to start tracking the data. In Korea, there's 3 basic tools that most clients would use. The first one is Naver Analytics. The second one is Google Analytics. But one of the more popular ones is called HCounter. In terms of the in-depth data that you can derive from each individual tool, based on experience, I think Google Analytics does provide the most in-depth detailed analysis. Naver Analytics is very vague. It doesn't really give you much other than, you know, here's the traffic, here's how many people visit a particular page, and that's pretty much it.
Naver Webmaster Tools, do you use it at all, or what is your opinion?
I recommend all of my clients to implement Naver Webmaster Tools, and that's just because I wanted to show Naver that yes, we're also using your properties to track some organic data, etc. So we favor Naver, and that's what we want to tell them. It's just a signal to them saying that, yes, we value the product offerings that you guys have available. So a lot of my foreign clients, when they first come in, all they have is Google Search Console and Analytics and everything that's Google-related, and we will start pushing them to start adding on Naver. Just because of those specific reasons.
Does Naver give you the ranking position through the webmaster tools, or that is not— okay, okay.
