Motoko’s weblog

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.

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.