As a foreign company who just opened up a local office or is planning on opening up, this posting might be useful. Typically if you wish to make your web site or blog visible to your target audience, you do search engine optimization (SEO) on your target search engine. This would be generally Google but in Korea, you MUST do it on NAVER. NAVER is a dominant search engine & portal service in South Korea.
Is NAVER SEO similar to Google SEO?
The short answer is “No.” A little long answer is “there are some similarities but fundamentally it’s different.”
First off, you can’t really optimize your web site on NAVER. Instead, you need a NAVER blog to do search engine optimization. Of course, there are other workaround methods but it’s more than the scope of this posting, so I will introduce it in a separate posting in the future.
This means you can’t make your web site visible to your target audiences. The ONLY way to make this happen is via a NAVER blog.
Secondly, a NAVER blog requires a constant content update. So unlike a web site, a NAVER blog requires new postings every week. Of course, you need to make content in a local language. And this would be hangeul (Korean Language). Therefore, unless you have a native Korean speaking staff, it’s difficult to operate a NAVER blog.
Typically, NAVER search engine optimization(SEO) time takes a few months, then you need to continue to maintain content to keep your optimized status intact.
Most importantly, if you wish to attract the Korean audience’s attention, you need to make your content interesting. This involves storytelling with lots of photos or other means of multimedia. So once you figure out how to nail down NAVER SEO, you need a good content designer and possibility good writer, too.
Korean SEO market is a little different; I have read a lot about it. And there are many ways to do online marketing of it.