Case study · My own site, Korean shopping guides
A Korean shopping guide site I built from scratch went from 151 to 23,761 monthly readers in five months, with almost 9 in 10 visits coming from Naver search.
By Jieun Kim, Naver SEO specialist ·
The site
Jikguwiki is a Korean guide site I run on my own. It explains how to buy from overseas online stores: which stores ship to Korea, how sizes convert, and what customs duty to expect. Korean shoppers read it before they place an order.
The problem
Korean shoppers ask these questions on Naver, in Korean, and the answers they found were scattered across old blog posts and forum threads. A new website starts with no authority on Naver, and Naver's results page favors its own blogs and Q&A over outside sites. I wanted to see how far a new site could get on Naver with research and structure alone.
What I did
- Before writing each guide, I checked the live Naver results page in a real browser: what kind of page ranks, which related searches Naver suggests, and how the top posts are titled.
- Built a list of more than 50,000 Korean shopping searches from Naver's keyword data, and wrote guides for the questions people actually type.
- Gave every guide the same structure: a short answer box at the top, a key-facts table, then step-by-step instructions and an FAQ. Readers and search engines find the answer in the same place every time.
- Answered related questions on Naver's Q&A service and in Naver blog posts, and pointed readers to the full guide.
Results
- 705 guides published since the first one in April 2026.
- 151 to 23,761 monthly readers between April and September 2026.
- 28,302 readers in the last 30 days.
- 89% of visits from Naver, most of it from people searching on their phones.
- 94% of readers in Korea, the audience the site is written for.
Why it worked
A new site cannot buy authority on Naver, but it can answer the exact question better than anything else on the page. Every guide started from what Korean shoppers type, used the same easy-to-scan structure, and was backed by answers on Naver's own Q&A and blogs. I use the same research and structure for clients entering Korea.
Figures from Google Analytics and WordPress, checked October 21, 2026.