Use your limited budget wisely.

It’s best to localize the site for the target market. It’s not just for SEO purpose, but also for the better customer experiences on your website. Now that the engines are pushing websites with the right signals (local language, local ccTLD, hosted in local market, etc.), it’s extremely difficult for anyone to rank well in foreign markets without the localized websites. If your budget is limited and you can only localize 2-5 pages, do that more for the better usability for foreign users. Do optimize the pages for your important target keywords, but you probably won’t see much of the traffic from foreign search engines at least for a while.

Social Media can be your global website.

The good news is that the Social Media Services can provide the place for your global website. You can immediately set up several pages in local language and start finding, meeting, and negotiating with potential customers. Rather than to build links to your localized website, network and connect with people through social media. By linking to your localized pages from the social media sites, you’ll bring traffic to the site where people take actions (download, sign-up, purchase, etc.).

Word of mouth will build the links.

We all know that the link building is an important part in SEO. You may not be able to outsource the link building work, and when you are running a business, you sure don’t have extra time to build the links yourself. But don’t be discouraged. If people come to your site through social media and other channels like what they see and experience on your websites, they’ll talk about it online and offline. As a result, you’ll get the links from people recommending you to others organically.

No one knows about your business better than you.

No one is more passionate about your business than you.You are the best marketing and the sales person for your business. Instead of money, invest your time to talk about your business, products, etc., and to provide the better customer care online.  And, when you do, listen to people and make the improvements where needed.

Educate yourself: SEO and PPC.

After your business starts to doing well online, you may want to localize and optimize the site properly. You may even have extra budget to run a PPC campaign in different markets. Before you step into them, it’s always a good idea to educate yourself about the basic SEO and PPC through training, seminars, and trusted online resources. Also, review stats and read some search marketing related articles about your target market. This would help you when selecting SEO/PPC company. Even if the language is different, the basics are still the same. I’ve seen many businesses failed to select the right SEO/PPC service provider for them, and having to spend more money with other service providers to fix the damages that the previous provider has made.

Small companies have its strength.

Small companies are much more flexible and quicker in adopting the changes, and this is definitely one of the biggest strengths they have. You can make the decision very quickly without having to go through the top-bottom and left-right channels for approval like your bigger competitors do. Leverage this strength throughout your online marketing from SEO, PPC to Social Media.

According to the report, Japan’s PPC advertising market (PC websites only) in 2008 grew 20% from 2007 to 1254 billion yen ($1.2 billion). MIAC predicts that the PPC advertising market (PC) in Japan will surpass the radio advertising market in 2010-2011 and will grow to $2 billion market by 2013.

The report also points out following:

• The search-able information on Internet grew 6 times from 2005 to 2009 due to the increase in video and music data available online.
• The number of average search engine users (per month) grew from 16.46 million in 2002 to 47.75 million in 2008.
• The number of Internet users grew from 21.59 million in 2002 to 47.77 million in 2008.
• 52.3% of businesses using PPC advertising think it’s effective.
• While PPC advertising market (both PC and mobile) continue to grow, the display advertising market may peak by 2011.

Although more than 50% of businesses using PPC advertising think it is effective, to many of them are running PPC ads for branding purpose, and not for the online conversions. According to the report, more than 65% of advertisers on web and mobile web run the campaign to improve the branding. Not sure how many companies in US can keep investing in PPC advertising which seems to be not bringing online conversions. And, this concerns me more than a little that Japanese businesses may be mislead or not being informed/educated about the effectiveness of SEM, and may end up disappointed in the Search Engine Marketing in near future.

This may be a way to strengthen Yahoo’s online advertising services, which currently provides display ads, text ads, e-mail ads and affiliate programs. By bringing in Overture’s PPC services into Yahoo advertising service plan, they will be able to provide the total online advertising services to its customers. And, in near future, we may be able to get a data and report showing if and how each advertising effort has positive impact on other advertising or marketing efforts.

Perhaps, this is a clever move before the integration of bing search engine into Yahoo site as many advertisers are wondering if the relation between Microsoft and Yahoo will include the advertising services in future or not.

According to Overture’s 2008 Q4 financial report (ended March 2009), Overture had more than 92.8 Billion yen in sales, which was more than 1/3 of Yahoo Japan’s overall sales in the same quarter.

According to Seed Planning’s report, the mobile advertising will become 100 billion yen (US$1 billion) market in 2008 in Japan from 81.5 billion yen in 2007. The number includes all of the advertising activities on mobile platform such as banner ads, affiliate ads, search paid ads and mailing ads. If it continues to grow at the same pace, the mobile advertising market will reach 250 billion yen by 2011.

The similar advertising is available for both PC version of the web and mobile version of the web. However, what works on PC market doesn’t always work the best with mobile market. For example, the report shows that the e-mail ads work better with mobile market than PC market. To run a successful advertising against mobile market, the advertisers must be flexible in selecting what style of advertising works the best for them instead of just re-cycling the same information and the practices they used in PC market.

The search box has been used in ads for a while in Japan, but was really taking off when I was in Japan back in July. I saw it on TV ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads, ads on train/subways, etc. etc. It was every where. I was curious, and tried several search phrases in different ads to see if they were ranking or not. I thought that their page should come up high in the search results along with the paid ad, if the search phrase was their company name, brand name, or product name, but some (like DoCoMo’s “Ano bucho” seemed to be too generic.) What I found was that in most cases, they rank high only for the paid ads in the search result page, and were no where to be found in the organic search results.

When you run a campaign like this, it’s like announcing the world, “If you search for this word, you will find us on the results page right away!”, and you should make sure to be on the 1st page of the search results 24-7. I was surprised and disappointed by the fact that many businesses chose not to optimize the landing page for the phrase. When the campaign money runs out, or the daily budget runs out, if you don’t rank well organically, someone else (maybe your competitors) would benefit from it.