Motoko’s weblog

When people say, “my site doesn’t perform well in Japan (or any foreign market)” or “people don’t sign up on our website”, often times I find that it’s the site (yes, your site), what is preventing from people to convert. Before you give up on the market, let’s do some research, review and understand where the bottle neck is.

1. Keywords
Are you targeting the right set of keywords? You’d be amazed how many search agencies out there still just translate the home language keywords and don’t bother doing a good keyword research in each market.
If you are not getting as much traffic as you expected, you may be going after wrong keywords.
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The time is tough, and the budget is shrinking… I understand. But localizing the website into local language is the first step in targeting the foreign countries, especially Japan. It is not just because the average Japanese don’t read/write in English well enough to understand the English content. If your website is not in Japanese, it would have little to no chances of being found in the search results in Japan. It’s that simple.

1. Japanese is the national language in Japan

When Japanese use search engines, it is highly likely that they enter Japanese keywords and phrases written in Japanese characters. If your website doesn’t have the keywords and phrases in Japanese as the searcher entered, your site won’t show up in the search results.
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Because of the nature of my business, when I talk about the Website Localization, I usually talk about SEO related issues such as the importance of the keyword research, the accuracy of the translation, and the issues related to domains and hosting.

When it comes to the Search Engine Marketing and Online Business in general, we tend to focus so much on how the website is crawled and indexed by the Search Engines, and the rankings on the search result pages. Perhaps, too much focus on SEO against engines, and forget that the website is there for people.

Localizing Forms

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