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.
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Because of the nature of my business, when I talk about the Website Localization, I usually talk about SEO related issues such as the importance of the keyword research, the accuracy of the translation, and the issues related to domains and hosting.

When it comes to the Search Engine Marketing and Online Business in general, we tend to focus so much on how the website is crawled and indexed by the Search Engines, and the rankings on the search result pages. Perhaps, too much focus on SEO against engines, and forget that the website is there for people.

Localizing Forms

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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 »
   

I like reading goo’s Ranking results (ranking.goo.ne.jp). You get a good laugh when reading the results for topics like “Canned goods that you always let expire” and “Things you want to peal off” (like scabs). Most of the topics have nothing to do with Internet or Search, but they just posted Top 20 results for “Things you hate about corporate web sites”, which I’d like to share.

These are all good points, and not just for Japanese people, but I think all of us have experienced the same frustrations at some point in time. I see issues like #2 (heavy image files), #4 (PDF file), “#10 (contact info) and #20 (English menus) all the time when I review localized corporate websites.

1. The site content has not been updated for months
People are looking for fresh content. There’s no excuses for corporate websites for not updating the site regularly. What year is the copyright on your site? Continue Reading »