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Digital Strategy, Web Development
3 Minutes
3 Tips for American Life Science Companies Expanding into China
ENSURE YOUR AMERICAN WEBSITE IS COMPATIBLE BEHIND CHINA’S FIREWALL.
The most simple way for companies and customers in China to learn more about your business is through your website. Unfortunately, Google is blocked in China, which presents a multitude of issues in search visibility and website load speed. Your sales team or customers in China may often complain that the website is slow, non-responsive, or broken.
Advanced Cell Diagnostics recently launched a new website, however in China there were problems regarding the usability of the website. Many life science websites face the same issue, but your China team can follow a few simple steps:
1) Access the website utilizing Google Chrome’s console. Console will record every script that loads on the website and point out any errors. On a Mac, press Cmd + Opt + J, on a PC press Ctrl + Shift + J.
2) Access the site homepage.
3) The console will populate in red with errors.
4) In the example below, the major issues loading the homepage in China involve any scripts that call upon YouTube and Google which are blocked. In Advanced Cell Diagnostics’ scenario, the website is calling upon scripts involving a Google Recaptcha, as well as YouTube videos. This increases the load time to tens of seconds or even longer until it eventually times out.
5) Save this console log, and send it to your developer for them to examine any additional errors.
PROVIDE CHINESE LANGUAGE PAGES WITH AUTO-IP REDIRECTION.
Showing an English language website to a growing customer base located in China isn’t the best way to market to your audience. Depending on which CMS platform your site is built with, there are a number of plugins and extensions that can detect the Geo-IP of a visitor, and direct them to the appropriate language website.
To ensure the redirection is done properly please follow the additional best practice tips:
It should also be best practice that you have:
1) Add hreflang tags to the website
2) Add your site to Webmaster Tools and apply the applicable Geolocation settings.
3) When linking across to the other Geo websites, try and link to the applicable page as opposed to just the home page.
USE SUBFOLDERS FOR MULTI-LANGUAGE WEBSITES INSTEAD OF SUBDOMAINS.
For SEO purposes, the best practice would be to utilize a subfolder with the different language website instead of a subdomain. A subdomain would look something like:
subdomain.example.com versus your primary domain as example.com. These are rccognized by Google as completely different websites and therefore there is no benefit for your main website’s SEO growth. For example, the better the SEO becomes for example.com/, the stronger the SEO becomes for example.com/cn/ because they pass link equity. If the Chinese website was hosted at cn.example.com, that subdomain would receive no link equity to help the main website rank better.
Supreme Optimization is one of the few full-service life science online marketing agencies with Ph.D. level expertise and fluency in the languages of science and business. Web development, SEO, branding, and content marketing are just a few of our services. Unlike oversized, overpriced, clunky big marketing firms, working with us means that you will get a dedicated project management methodology to fit your specific needs.
