How to Drive More Traffic to Your Xiaohongshu Posts

There is a saying “Chinese girls treat Xiaohongshu as Baidu”. Baidu is the biggest search engine in China, therefore this saying encapsulates a key behavior of consumers using Xiaohongshu. On Xiaohongshu, people not only scroll through their feed to discover new content, they often actively search for content on the app, typing in brand and product names or keywords such as “moisturizing lotion”. 

This means that it is important for brands to consider SEO and hot keywords when creating content for Xiaohongshu. Here are a couple tips for optimizing your content: 

Finding Trending Topics 

The easiest way to make your content be seen is to take advantage of trending keywords. But how can you spot the trends? You can go to the search page and see what are the grey words that appear in the search bar. Those are topics that other users are searching for. Then look below that at the recommended section, those are topics other users are searching for as well.

After capturing these key phrases, include them in your post title and content. In this case, the system will automatically recommend your content to more people, so the post gets more exposure.

Note: The recommended topics with the blue symbols next to them are paid campaigns. If you don’t mind piggybacking on top of another brand’s campaign, you can create content using their brand campaign keyword and benefit from the traffic they are driving to their campaign.

Find Related Keywords & Long Tail Keywords 

If you want to write about something that’s not included either in the searching column nor in the recommended content section, for example, if you want to write something about skin brightening products. Here is what you can do:

Put “ skin brightening” (美白) in the search bar and you will see below that in addition to skin brightening, additional related long tail keywords will pop up. For example, whitening serum, whitening body lotion, whitening face masks etc.

Depending on how popular your original search term is, it is much more effective to use these long tail keywords so that your content doesn’t get drowned out and you can reach a more targeted audience. 

Find Popular Keywords That Describe Your Brand or Product

If your brand or product is not well known in China, it is much more effective to focus on incorporating popular keywords into your posts instead of including the name of your product or brand everywhere. 

For example, if you want to tell users that in Bangkok, a vintage store called PAPAYA is very good for taking pictures, you better not put “PAPAYA” in the title. Because when users are searching where to take pictures in Bangkok, they won’t search for PAPAYA. So in this case, you’d better make the title more general, something like “the best vintage store to take pictures at in Bangkok”. You just need to think what keywords users will put in the searching bar if they are looking for your content.

Get Readers to Use Keywords in the Comments Section

Another way to increase your posts’ exposure is the comment zone as comments also count towards a brand’s SEO. So you may want to think about how to end your post and guide users to put those key words in the comment zone. Or if you answer users’ questions in the comments, be sure to use keywords in your response.

Read more: 都2020了，我们再来聊聊小红书上的关键词设置｜方法论