Worldwide, there are only three countries where the default search engine is not Google. Those are Russia, China and Korea. The search engine (or more appropriately, portal) most used in Korea is called Naver (owned by NHN). It is the fifth largest search engine in the world.
According to Nielsen Koreanclick, the top search engines in Korea are: Naver, Daum and Google. Korea’s second largest portal is Daum, which merged with Kakao (known for the mobile messaging application KakaoTalk). A breakdown of market share is in the image below.
Google may have more unique visitors, people spend more time on Daum and it has more pageviews. (The demographic that uses Daum is older.) Why this discrepancy between PC and mobile?
This may have to do with the fact that Google is the default search engine on many smartphones (Chrome).
With Naver and Daum you can also email, blog, do Q&A, shop, watch TV and read news. The rate of user generated content is high, all different kinds of content are clearly distinctive in the result page of a query. Like brand search, other ads, site search, news, video, etc., a specific section in the SERP of Naver is reserved for blogs.
The structure of the SERP can be different with every query! Also, with the same query there can be differences on the SERP between PC and mobile.
The most eye catching ad in both Naver and Daum is “brand search”, an example is below with 4 images and multiple links. It features a banner above the regular text ads.
Instead of just text, it also shows images. While it gives your brand a lot of legitimacy, there are some requirements to be eligible for brand search. One of these requirements is that you can only use keywords related to your brand. The minimum click budget for brand search is 500,000 won, roughly $500.
Website, content and shopping ads are very similar to Google text and shopping ads.
What are the most used social networks in Korea? That depends on page views, time spent, on mobile app or desktop. According to WiseApp, the most popular social media apps are:
Android has roughly 71% market share vs. 28% iOS. There is a Korean “One Store” run by telecom companies and Naver that competes with Google Play and App Store. One Store has a 39% market share. Facebook is also experimenting with food ordering, and is helping startups in Korea to go global. Six million Koreans use Instagram. As for demographics, younger people (people in their 10s and 20s) prefer Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, older people (40s and 50s) use KakaoStory and Band.
According to another study, YouTube is the most popular with teens. Both Naver TV and Kakao TV are making efforts to capture market share from YouTube in Korea. Through YouTube, Google gets a lot of ad revenue while Naver leads in PC and mobile ads.
What about the importance of smartphones and tablets? The majority of traffic now comes from mobile, in categories like restaurants (and with younger people) it can be higher than 57%. In Korea, 84 percent use SNS through their mobile devices while only 1.5 percent used personal computers. More and more advertising budget is spent on mobile and online. The Korean advertising market grew 15% in 2016 and 32% (1.75 trillion won) was spent on digital. Of digital, 49% went to mobile. This meant a growth of 36% compared to the year before (the largest growth among sectors).
Want more Koreans to visit your website? Then you have to do search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is necessary to rank higher organically in any search engine or portal. Search engines and portals have factors to decide how much traffic they send you. These characteristics are also called algorithms. Search engines are machines, so they use robots (spiders or web crawling bot) to discover new and updated pages to be added to the index.
Compared to Google, it is relatively fast and easy to rank first page in Naver or Daum using, for example, Naver Blog or Daum Blog. As for optimization, Naver Webmaster Tool is your first (free) step towards visibility on the Korean market. For SEO purposes, it is highly recommendable to use Naver’s homegrown blogging service – in some cases it even ranks higher than your website.
