Motoko’s weblog

Since the announcement of bing-Yahoo deal in US, Softbank president has made a comment that he welcomed the deal, and there was a high possibility for Yahoo Japan to incorporate bing search, too. While the detail is still need to be discussed between the two search giants, his public comment can be viewed as a “GO” sign for the deal in Japan. (Softbank is the biggest share holder of Yahoo Japan.)

Personally, I think bing and Yahoo Japan are even a better match than US counterparts, and here’s why:

Yahoo Japan would keep its popular brand that has been known as a face of search in Japan. This will prevent from losing search users for not being familiar with bing search. Many search users simply search using Yahoo tool bar, and it’ll probably take a while for many (average) search users to notice that it’s powered by bing. Continue Reading »

About 3 weeks ago, the news of Google Japan using paid bloggers to promote their new “hot new keywords” function on the top page took over the search industry around the world. (You can read my initial thought on the topic here.) What’s very interesting to me is that everyone has been spinning it as a “link-spam scheme”, and as a result, Google “punished” Google Japan by down grading the page rank from 9 to 5. (Yeah, that should really hurt Google Japan. lol)

Paid or not, the “word of mouth” campaign using blog has been quite effective in Japan. Many people are aware that some of the bloggers may be paid to write the review, and still welcome the information especially since being compensated doesn’t mean that they’d write something that are not true. Several surveys done in Japan show that people trust and value what they read on blog posts, and often time what they read has an impact on their purchasing decision or action. I assume that Continue Reading »

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.  Continue Reading »

According to Seedplanning’s 2008 online advertising report, Japan’s Online Advertising Market had a small growth in 2008 from 2007. (See below.) The report shows that about 60% of 458 companies who participated in the survey answered that they used online advertising services in 2008.

Q: Did you use Online Advertising services?

2008: Yes – 64.3%, No – 35.7%

2007: Yes – 63.0%, No – 37.0%

The report also shows that 11% of online advertisers in 2007 did not advertise online in 2008, while 12.3% started to use online advertising services in 2008. Continue Reading »