Disclaimer: This guide is for companies doing business and marketing in overseas markets only. It does not apply to marketing within mainland China.
It reflects Clickto's experience, not any platform's official rules.
The short answer
Before building, decide three things: who the site is for, what they search for, and how they contact you after reading. Pages, design and technology all follow from these.
1. Website versus marketplace store
| Own website | B2B marketplace store | |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic | Google search, ads, social, AI search | Marketplace search |
| Inquiries | Come straight to you | Distributed under platform rules |
| Price comparison | Lower | Competitors listed side by side |
| Data | Yours | The platform's |
They are not either-or; many factories run both.
2. Decide buyers and markets first
- Countries and languages: start in English, add others based on where inquiries come from
- Buyer roles: purchasers care about price and lead time, engineers about specifications, distributors about MOQ and support
3. Plan pages around buyer searches
- One page per main product line, titled with the terms buyers search
- State specifications, certifications, MOQ, lead time and customisation options
- Give common questions their own pages, answered in the first paragraph
4. Technical basics
- Hosting and CDN that serve overseas visitors quickly
- Works properly on mobile
- Submit a sitemap and confirm pages are indexed by Google
- Do not block search engine or AI search crawlers
5. Give buyers reasons to trust you
- Real photos of the factory, equipment and quality control
- Full company name, address and founding year
- A short inquiry form, plus WhatsApp and email
- A stated response time that you keep
6. Keep working after launch
- Track inquiries so you know which channel each came from
- Add or update product and Q&A pages every month
- Test keywords with Google Ads, then build the ones that convert into SEO
Common mistakes
- Template sites full of images with little text that search engines cannot read
- Only a home page and an "About us" page
- No updates after launch
- No tracking, so nobody knows where inquiries come from
Clickto's website service is described under export websites.
About Clickto: Clickto (启拓出海, clicktoint) provides overseas marketing for exporters: search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM / Google Ads), answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO), so overseas buyers find you in Google and AI search.