A Basics Guide To Setting Up On Shenma

Shenma, developed by Alibaba Group, is a mobile-first search engine aimed at China’s expanding mobile internet user base. Setting up your business on Shenma can help you reach this growing audience effectively. Here’s how you can get started:

Utilize Shenma Search Webmaster Tools

The first step is to register your site with Shenma’s Webmaster Tools.

Much like Baidu and Sogou, Shenma offers a platform where businesses can submit their websites, verify them, and monitor essential metrics.

By using this tool, you can track your site’s crawling statistics, indexing status, and search queries.

These insights allow you to better understand how Shenma’s search engine interacts with your content, helping you improve your search visibility and site performance.

Prioritize Mobile-Friendly Design

Shenma, being a mobile-centric search engine, places a high priority on websites that offer a smooth mobile experience. This goes beyond just having a responsive design. Your website should be optimized for fast page loads, offer easy navigation, and have readable content on smaller screens.

To enhance your performance on Shenma, consider the following mobile-friendly features:

  • Fast loading times: Ensure that your website loads quickly on mobile networks to reduce bounce rates.
  • Easy-to-read content: Text and headings should be clear and engaging, making the user experience pleasant.
  • Intuitive navigation: Make it simple for users to find what they’re looking for, with clear buttons, links, and menus.

A well-optimized mobile site will not only improve your rankings on Shenma but also lead to a better user experience, boosting traffic and engagement.

Explore Shenma’s Advertising Solutions

Shenma provides several advertising options that help businesses increase visibility and drive traffic. These ad formats cater to different campaign goals:

  • Paid Search Ads: These ads appear at the top of Shenma’s search results, giving your business prominent exposure to users actively searching for relevant content. They are great for driving immediate traffic to your site.
  • Shenma Brand Zone Ads: This ad format appears at the top of search results, showcasing your business with branding elements such as logos, images, and slogans. It’s perfect for boosting brand awareness and creating a strong first impression.
  • Brand Zone with App Download: An extension of the Brand Zone ad format, this option allows businesses to promote app downloads directly from search results. This is particularly effective for businesses aiming to increase mobile app installs.

By leveraging Shenma’s advertising solutions, you can reach more users and achieve specific marketing goals, whether you’re focusing on brand exposure or driving conversions.

Conclusion

Setting up your business on Shenma involves registering through Shenma Webmaster Tools, optimizing your site for mobile, and exploring its advertising options.

These steps will help you connect with China’s growing mobile audience and improve your brand’s presence in this vital market.

Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.