Motoko’s weblog

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.
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On July 27, Yahoo Japan and Google Japan announced that Yahoo Japan’s organic search results will soon be powered by Google. Needless to day, this change would have a huge impact on many search marketers and site owners targeting Japanese market. Today, I’d like to go over the facts mentioned in the announcements, and examine how it may change the search marketing in Japan.

Fact 1) Yahoo Japan will use Google’s organic search engine
I personally welcome this change in regards to the algorithm producing the search results. Unfortunately, it is a well known fact that those link farms and the paid links can improve the organic ranking in Yahoo right now, and many search marketers and the site owners in Japan think/believe that SEO is nothing more than Continue Reading »

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIAC) has announced its annual report on “State of Internet Search Engine Marketing and Market Size” by Institute for Information and Communications Policy department.

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: Continue Reading »

The first ad:tech Tokyo was held on September 2 and 3 at the Price Park Tower Tokyo, and it was indeed a blast as it is commented on their website. Despite the current downward financial situation in Japan and Asia, the place was packed with people eager to hear and learn from some of the leading figures in the industry. I haven’t seen the conferences filled with positive energy like this one in recent years in Japan, and was great to be a part of it.

One of the biggest differences between the ad:tech conferences in Tokyo and other locations was that this one was more focused on the advertising with heavy mass media messaging rather than the digital marketing and the search marketing. You could see strong Dentsu influences to many sessions, which probably shows the current advertising market in Japan. Continue Reading »