I’ve been providing Japanese Search Marketing services to US and European companies since 1998. Because Japan has been one of the most advanced market online where people actually drop money (Japan is the second largest e-commerce market in the world) since the early years of Internet, regardless of the size of the business, Japan has been one of the attractive online market for foreign businesses. What’s interesting and troubling at the same time is that the type of inquiries I receive haven’t changed much for the past 10 years. There are 4 groups of inquiries:

  1. We have a website in English (or one of the European languages), and want Japanese website created and optimized. Don’t know much about how to go about it, and open to suggestions. Oh, and interested in doing PPC campaign, too.
  2. We just create a Japanese website, and need someone to optimize it. Will send you the English keyword list for SEO and PPC campaign.
  3. We have a Japanese website and our in-house team is managing it. Experiencing some problems and can really use outside help to guide them to the next level.
  4. We want to target Japanese market, but our English site should do just fine. 

Regardless of the development stage or the understanding of doing business with oversea markets online, they all face the issues in developing a website and the ad campaigns that would be well accepted in foreign market. When I respond to them with some points to consider, just to make sure that they are ready for the project, often times they are surprised by it.

When creating a website for different markets, you can expect many benefits from centralizing the work. For example, if all websites use the same template, you’d need to optimize one set of template, and all websites will be benefited from the changes. Of course, you need to optimize the content separately. At the same time, centralized efforts could create new issues such as geo recognition by the engines. Sure, we can now use the geo-setting to tell Google which market the website is for, but engines such as Yahoo don’t provide the solution, yet. It is easy to say that you just need to get the local domain, but in order to obtain the local domain, you need to have the registered office and business in that country in many cases.

Global websites are not “copies” of your home website

The language is most definitely the major player in developing global website. Translating the site into different languages only puts you to the starting point, and you are far from ready to enter the market. You need to research keywords in each market separately. Not by the language, but by the market. The keyword research tells you some unique differences in search words trend even among English speaking countries. I’m not just talking about the spelling. The culture and what’s “in” in that market has huge impact on the searched phrases. Also, correct translation doesn’t meant that your pages contain the most searched phrases. For example, a simple word like “picture” can be translated in several different words in Japanese. Depending on which word your translator chooses to use, it may limit your potential exposure in Japanese market, and the campaign may fail.

Large sized corporation may face bigger challenges

Bigger does not always mean better, and the same can be said about managing the global website. The communication break down, loosing control over the teams in different market and frustration with limited room to adopt local market trend and needs, etc. many companies who own global website deal with new challenges, which are not the issues when you operating a website just targeting one market.

It is said that more companies will develop global website in 2009 especially targeting Asian market. I am looking forward to doing the session “Key points in launching a global website” on March 24 at Search Engine Strategies New York. There are 3 in-house experts on that panel with me. I’m very happy that they agreed to share their experiences in developing and managing global website. In relation to the SES NY session, I had a pleasure of being interviewed by Glenn Gabe of G-squared Interactive. As you can read on his blog, he has experiences in working with global websites and understands the challenges, which made the interview fun and interesting. It seems that more companies are at the stage to tackle the issues now. I hope the session will provide information and ideas to make them prepared better in launching a global website.