Have you ever used or worked with the Korean search engine Naver? Experienced the Naver site? For non-Korean speakers, navigating Naver may seem almost impossible unless you are able to machine translate the search results page in order to understand each section. Meanwhile, according to recent research, Korea is one of the few countries in the world where Google cannot outrank the local search engine, Naver, or where Google hasn’t managed yet to dominate market share. 

Naver has over 56% of the market share in Korea, and that includes many of the Naver services, such as Naver Blog, which is Korea’s leading blogging and user-generated content platform with around 58% of Koreans using it. So, if you are an advertiser aiming to penetrate the South Korean market, this is definitely a channel that should be part of your overall content strategy. 

Three of the most popular Naver blogs are South Korea Guseok Guseok (a group promoting travel within South Korea that partners with the Tourist Commission and other firms), Lotte Department Store (one of the most popular department stores in Korea), and Samsung Electronics (a Korean electronics company), with an average of 70k followers. All three post regularly about specific themes while conducting frequent events that result in a lot of visitors and increased traffic. The thumbnail images are generally eye-catching with text that is sufficient to induce people’s clicks.

How to improve your blog writing 

In order to have your editorial/blog content rank in top search results—which would boost organic traffic and visibility/brand awareness, as well as drive more traffic and generate leads—you need to post frequently and have a precise understanding of the platform. Unlike other best blogging platforms, Naver Blog has changed and developed its own algorithm over the decades to show the most relevant but unique results to users, similar to how SEO works for Google. Currently, Naver Blog uses the combination of the C-Rank and DIA model, evaluating both the reliability of the content, including the search rankings, and the quality of the content in terms of relevancy and uniqueness.

Here are some general blogging tips for writing on Naver Blog as an advertiser or content generator:

• Consider your audience: who are you hoping to attract with this content?
• Have a conversational tone: write like you are talking to the audience.
• Grab their attention: in the first few sentences, make sure they know why they should read your blog. 
• Provide value: give your audience something to walk away with.
• Optimize titles and content: use short paragraphs, short sentences, and bulleted lists when possible.
• Create an attention-grabbing title with industry-specific keywords or descriptive phrases, including “how to” or a numbered list. You can improve SEO and increase the click-through rate by having the related keywords in the title. These can be found through keyword research.
• Vary sentence length and structure.
• Avoid linking verb phrases.
• Establish a thought-leadership stance: do not use the content as a company promotion.
• Avoid mentioning the company’s name until the call to action (CTA) unless it’s a testimonial piece.
• Stay between 1,500–3,000 Korean characters.
• Avoid forcing information or “fluff”—keep it informative.
• Use a clear CTA when applicable.
• Insert some interesting original videos, images, and internal and external links by hyperlinking the copy.
• Last but not least, keep your Naver Blog “active” and update it daily.

How to best utilize Naver Blog

Now that we’ve laid out the basics—it is time to get to work. Start by setting up your own Naver Blog Channel. Simply go to the Naver Blog site and open the section with your Naver account for free. When you set your blog topic, we highly recommend selecting one to two categories such as travel, IT, pets, movies, etc., to ensure you have consistent content. This will increase the chance that your blog posts will be selected on the Naver main page as the “trendy article” for a specific category, which is shown to all Naver users. Also, do not forget to communicate with other bloggers—this networking counts on your blog score, which is a reflection of your search results ranking and the quality of your blog overall. Moreover, if you have social media channels like Facebook and Instagram, promote your blog posts on them to bring in more traffic.

To analyze the success of your Naver Blog, simply click the “analysis” button on the Naver Blog site to check the number of views, likes for each post, and the overall visitors to your channel in a day, in a week, and in a month. Naver also helps sort out the best-performing posts on your blog by the number of impressions, clicks, and comments. It is totally up to you to set the KPI (key performance indicator), but if you are a new user, impressions and clicks are the most common metrics to measure the performance of each post.

You may also consider leveraging key organizational leaders (KOLs) on the Naver Blog to promote your content or products for you.

If you are hesitating about joining the Naver Blog platform, start now—otherwise, you will have a harder time ranking above others due to a more competitive algorithm as the number of content creators increases.

Ready to join Naver Blog? Reach out to TPT Digital today to get started: 
https://www.transperfect.com/industries/digital-marketing-advertising