Motoko’s weblog

On the day 1 of SES NY this year, I am presenting for “Key Points in Launching a Global Website” session from 4:15pm. Effectively managing a website targeting your local market is one thing, and managing a website (or websites) targeting multiple market is definitely another. I am going to show some data, examples and how-to information that come from my experiences in working with clients who have multinational and global websites.

Here’s the session description:

As the world becomes smaller and search marketing becomes more complex, the era of “ranking well in Google” is over. This is especially true for companies who are targeting multiple markets or countries. This new opportunity also brings many new complexities to be considered other than standard SEO. Continue Reading »

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.
Continue Reading »

I wrote an article “Social Media Marketing – The Japanese Way” for ClickZ earlier this month. The article received more than 300 re-tweets in 3 days (currently has 350+), and it got me thinking how little information about non-US market is available, even in the world of “Internet”, which supposed to connect everyone, everywhere.

Actually, there are lots of data available from different markets. But if you speak (read/write) in English, you typically see the information available only in English. This is probably why, my article, which was in English, was well received in US and other non-Japanese speakers.
Btw, Continue Reading »

One of the biggest search industry conferences, Search Engine Strategies New York will be held next week (March 23-25), and this year, I will be speaking at 2 sessions:
- Managing a Global SEO Campaign on March 23 from 12:45pm
- Crossing Boarders: Global Site Clinic on March 25 from 4pm

Me and 4 other Global SEO experts will share the knowledge, experiences and case studies at the Global SEO session. Don’t worry, 5 of us have coordinated the content of our presentations so that you won’t hear the same thing from each of us. Instead, you’ll learn different topic from different angles from both agency and in-house operation.

I’m also looking forward to the Global Site Clinic session, which I will be on a panel with (who else?) Bill Hunt. I did this session in London last month, which turned out to be a very interesting session for everyone from already have global sites with some concerns to the business owners who are considering of using website to reach overseas markets.

See you in New York!