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.

2. Message
Is your site content truly localized by adopting the cultural differences? Translation companies usually don’t do this.
In some market, you may need to provide additional information, depending on the knowledge level against the services/products.
If you are getting good number of traffic, but not taking action(s) that you want them to make (clicking “order” button, etc.) to convert, there’s a good chance that they are not interested in your services/products or didn’t like what they saw on the page.

3. Conversion steps
Usually, the more steps you make people to take before the conversion points, the less they convert. You should make it as easy as possible for people to take the action (conversion point), and shouldn’t make them work so hard to do that.
Starting from the search results page, how many clicks and pages do you put people go through before they finally hit that “SEND” button? If you have the analytics tool set up correctly, you should be able to follow the path people took once they were on your site. It also shows the links people clicked. These data give you a good idea of where you lost them.

4. Being cheap on localization
Especially if you have a large site, it may not be realistic to localize the entire site at once. However, you want to localize those pages that people need to go through in order to convert.
I’ve seen some sites that make people go through un-localized pages to convert. If you land on one company’s English site and got order form in language you don’t understand after clicked “order” on English page, would you continue? Unlikely, right?

5. Consideration stage
People may not convert at first. Unless you are targeting the conversion stage keywords, it is likely that they may leave your site without converting the first time. It is important to understand your customer’s typical buying stages, product lead time, etc., and consider that when reading the website traffic/conversion data.

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.

2. Location matters — to the search engines

As you may know, the search engines such as Google and Yahoo favor the web pages closer to the location where the search user is, and the web pages in the language spoken where the search user is. This is true even if the keyword is written in English, or even if it’s a simple model number such as “MSL-47″.  Here’s an example of the search results for the keyword “Apple” in Google.com, Google Japan and Yahoo Japan. As you can see, even though the keyword is in “English”, Google Japan and Yahoo Japan assume that you want the results from sites in Japanese (and/or in Japan), they show pages in Japanese.

search results - Google.com

Search results - Google Japan

Search results - Yahoo Japan

I also would like to point out that while having Japanese ccTLD domain is important, localizing the site in Japanese is even more important for the site to rank well in Japan. Many websites with “.com” or non-Japanese ccTLD domain rank well with their Japanese websites.

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

When localizing the forms (registration, order, etc.) for Japanese market, in addition to translating the fields, you need to change followings:

• Names: family name first, then the given name
• Address: Zip code (xxx-xxxx), Prefecture, City/Town, Street number, Suite number, bldg name/Floor number
• If you have them select the country, put Japan at the top of the country list.
• Phone: The number of digit for phone numbers varies from city to city in Japan such as “03-xxxx-xxxx”, “092-xxx-xxxx”, and “08xx-xx-xxxx”. It’s safer to give one field to enter all digits than to break them into 3 fields.
• Toll free number: Your US toll free number may or may not work from Japan. You can obtain Japanese toll free number (0123-xxxx).

Also keep in mind that if you offer a form in Japanese, it is most likely that people will fill it out in Japanese. If you are willing to accept the information in Japanese, make sure your form and the system work well with Japanese characters. If not, be sure to ask them to fill it out using alphabet at the top of the form.