SEO in Japan: a how-to guide Ray Grieselhuber is the founder and CEO of GinzaMetrics. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, ranking directly after the US and China. The size of the ecommerce industry was roughly US$96 billion (using today’s exchange rates) in 2013, making it roughly a fifth of the size the US ecommerce market. Out of all of the markets in Asia, Japan is attractive for a variety of reasons, including having a stable economy, consumers that are rabid for specific types of products, and a strong desire for authentic brands, meaning that knock-off products are not seen as desirable. Building loyalty in Japan can add up 20-30 percent of a company’s global revenue over the long term, resulting in a sticky, sustainable revenue stream. So, how do you do it? If you have no experience in Japan, or in Asia as a whole, you’ll immediately run into some challenges. The market and consumer culture can seem impenetrable. The consumers are picky and demand both high quality and excellent customer service. If your brand or product is unknown in Japan, you’ll need to spend time on creating a brand. Japanese consumers prefer quality over value, but you have to know which buttons to push in order to build a successful strategy. The strategies you can use in order to address each one of these challenges could fill a book. So, for now, let’s discuss some of the more practical aspects of online marketing in Japan, making the assumption that you’ve already vetted your core product and branding strategy for the Japanese market. Speaking broadly, you can break your digital marketing strategy into two major categories: paid and organic customer acquisition. Paid acquisition refers, of course, to the use of advertising, affiliate and referral programs. Paid acquisition can be a great means for getting to scale quickly and testing new products in market without investing overly much in a long term approach that has not yet been proven. Eventually, however, you’re going to want to consider organic acquisition as a major, if not the key, source of your new customer traffic. Organic acquisition can be broken into further categories and also goes by several other names, including “inbound marketing” and “content marketing.” I speak mostly about content marketing as the name itself is closest to what you’re actually doing – reaching new customers through high quality content. Content marketing can be thought of as the overall strategy; within content marketing there are various traffic and acquisition channels, including organic search, social media, email, and more. In my experience, the most successful companies rely on a mix of these acquisition channels. But for many, organic search, or SEO, remains one of the most powerful. The reason SEO is so powerful is that it is tied directly to what people are searching for when they happen across your website. The degree to which your website is both findable and relevant for your audience is tied directly to how successful you can be in any market. SEO can be tricky, though. Even in a market and language where you have native capabilities, it can be competitive and reliant on lots of trial and error. Add in a completely new market and language to the mix and you’re faced with making the decision of whether it’s worthwhile for your business. If you’ve decided that it does make sense to succeed in Japan, you can use this guide to get started in the right direction. Realize that SEO is anything but “free” A surprisingly common misconception, even today, is that organic search traffic is free, primarily because you’re not paying advertising fees for that traffic. On the contrary, creating high quality content, especially when you are just starting, can be an extremely expensive process. The economics are entirely different than advertising. With organic search, you have high upfront costs and ongoing costs relative to the degree to which you create new content on an ongoing basis, in addition to other costs such as optimization and management. The benefits have to be clear and the economics have to make sense. There are a variety of tools and techniques that you can use in order to perform the cost/benefit analysis necessary to deciding whether SEO makes sense for you and how much to spend on it. Decide your goals and set KPIs It’s surprising how many people start talking about SEO without articulating what they hope to get out of the process. At a minimum, you should realize that you want to target keywords with sufficient monthly search volume to hit your traffic targets. You’ll also need to understand how click through rates (CTR) work in search engines. At most, if you rank in the number one position for a given keyword, you can expect to get on average 30 percent of the clicks on the search engine results page (SERP). Plug that percentage into your model where you’ve targeted keywords by search volume and you’ve got a basic, back-of-the-napkin estimate of how much traffic you can acquire. Practically, this means you should aim to be in one of the top three positions on the SERP for every keyword that matters to you. Once you’ve figured out how you’re going to get the traffic, decide what your business goals are. A rule of thumb for ecommerce companies is that you’re trying to increase the number of new sales and repeat customers. For SaaS or B2B services, you’re trying to increase the number of conversions, repeat visitors, and referrals from your visitors. For brands with no direct conversion, you’re probably still stuck counting visits and page views. Start tracking your performance against these goals from day one and you’ll have a much clearer picture of what your next moves will be. Pay more attention to Yahoo in Japan than you would in the US A surprising fact for marketers new to the Japanese market is that Yahoo is still a highly valuable search engine. In certain industries, its traffic still accounts for up to 40-50 percent of a site’s overall organic search traffic. Most of the actions that you’ll take for Yahoo Japan are the same as what you would do for Google Japan, but you’ll want to make sure you’re tracking your rankings and traffic from Yahoo Japan. It is necessary to know that Yahoo Japan now uses Google’s index to serve up search results, so the results themselves will be virtually the same in most cases. There are sometimes subtle differences and how this plays out on mobile can depend quite a bit on the most popular devices in your audience segment. Regardless, you’ll want to give at least equal weight to the traffic potential from Yahoo Japan as an organic search referrer. Understand that localization means more than just translation Localization is hard. It’s not hard due to the technical aspects of translation (although that can also be a challenge) but because, many times, a simple translation of your website’s content into Japanese is nowhere near satisfactory in ranking well and reaching your target audience. The way Japanese consumers interact with a website is quite different than how their US counterparts interact on the web, so understanding this from both a design and content perspective is crucially important. Specifically, Japanese consumers expect to see a lot more on the page in terms of text and images. A canonical example of this is Rakuten, Japan’s largest ecommerce portal. A quick look at the Rakuten page in Japanese shows a page that, to Western eyes, looks busy and cluttered: Believe it or not, this is a substantially cleaner look than the way the Rakuten homepage appeared just a few years ago. For comparison, here is the English version: Overall, the English version is far more visual and has less text on the page. Japanese users looking at this sort of design will often remark that the page feels sabishii (desolate or lonely) and that they have a hard time trusting a company with so little content. This matters far more than you would think, subconsciously, and has a direct impact on conversions. Another common mistake I see with non-Japanese companies trying to enter the market is that they don’t bother to use photos and videos that will appeal to the Japanese market. Japanese consumers are generally quite fashion-conscious, critique minute details about people’s appearance (such as a cut of someone’s suit or dress) and, in some demographics, alarmingly xenophobic. Photos that do quite well in many Western markets will turn off Japanese consumers. It is well worth the time and investment required to source quality images and videos that will appeal to the Japanese sensibilities. Figure out how you’re going to handle mobile Responsive designed is the preferred and recommended approach to website design when it comes to SEO in the US and other markets. In Japan, because mobile was adopted at large scale long before smartphones even existed, there is a longstanding history of creating content specifically for mobile devices. Even today, a large number of Japanese brands do this and don’t take naturally to responsive design. This matters for you when, even if you have decided to opt for responsive design, you’re going to be working with Japanese agencies and developers, who may be far more proficient at creating websites segmented for mobile. Once you’ve decided on your approach, you’ll need to address this architecture decision as part of your technical SEO strategy. Build your brand around quality and differentiation One of the most striking differences in the Japanese consumer mindset when compared with the American (and that of many other Western countries) mindset is that Japanese consumers will mostly opt for quality and brand recognition over value and affordability. This can serve foreign companies well if they take the time to create a brand that tells a unique story about quality and prestige. For those companies who don’t invest in creating this story, it will be difficult to achieve anything at all. How to do this is far beyond the scope of this particular article but it is well worth the time to understand and ensure that you’ve taken this critical step. Build a Japan-specific content strategy Earlier in the article, I discussed the importance of true localization, that is creating or re-creating content specifically for the target market. Building a Japan-specific content strategy goes even further. It is a strategy that goes truly “native” in its design. What I mean by this is simple: let your content strategy in Japan live as independently as possible from your global corporate agenda. Hire Japanese employees and agencies to guide your strategy. Take the time to truly understand your audience. Aspire to create content, websites and the entire customer experience around Japanese expectations. If you succeed at this, you have a chance at securing a dominant place within the market for your products and services. This doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice your identity as a foreign firm. On the contrary, being a well-regarded brand abroad can work wonders to help build your story in Japan. What is important is being able to function equally well in a way that Japanese consumers are used to when they buy products and services from companies. Base your content strategy on personas and your customer’s journey The previous two sections were a little abstract, so let’s talk about how to apply the two outcomes from those sections (a unique brand story that is relevant to the Japanese market and a Japan-specific content strategy) to the practical work of implementing your strategy for content marketing and SEO. As you may be well aware from your marketing activities in your existing markets, creating good content depends on knowing who you are addressing. One of the most concrete ways to do this is to create personas for the people who comprise your target market. Shoot for, at most, three to four personas to get started. More likely, you’ll be able to test your results more accurately by focusing on a fewer number, with even one or two for starters. There are many good resources online about building a customer persona. Buffer’s introduction (from which the image below is taken) is pretty straightforward and complete. Don’t get too bogged down in the details that don’t matter for your segment (such as age, income bracket, etc.) – only use them if they are relevant. Once you have your personas created, you can start mapping out your customer journeys for each one of your personas. The idea of the customer journey flips the marketing funnel on its head (which is business-focused) and instead teaches marketers to think about how the customer will interact with different ideas, sites, and content on the way to making their final decision (becoming customer-focused). A customer-focused approach is essential in the 21st century in all aspects of marketing and this is doubly true for both SEO and content marketing. Your goal as a marketer is to be found organically at every step along the customer’s journey to that final decision. Just going through the process of mapping out your customer journey should provide you with ample content ideas and you will be able to refer to this journey again and again as you create more content. As is true with persona creation, there are many great resources online for learning how to create and map out an effective customer journey. McKinsey has a good introductory article and I personally like Google’s data-driven, interactive visualization of common customer journeys in well-known consumer segments. The flow according to Google This guide from Six Revisions (also pictured below) is nice as well both because of the usefulness of their static visuals and also the additional thought put into trying to understand the emotional state of the customer at each stage in the journey. Use data to target specific keywords and topics Once you’ve mapped out your content topics, you’ll want to start translating these into specific keywords with associated search volume so that you can plan for the right amount of traffic to send to your website. These will also be the keywords for which you want to start tracking keyword rankings for both your site and your competitor sites. Not all keyword discovery tools have good data for the Japanese market but there are tools out there that have rich data sets for Japan and many other markets. Pay attention to the basics of site and content optimization One of the surprising things about SEO over the years is how little some of the fundamentals have changed. There have been hundreds of important changes every year since Google took the stage, but some of the rules that really matter about SEO stay consistent year after year: Use a unique URL for each major page and content idea. Don’t rely too much on Javascript navigation Create high quality content that is unique to your site and is unique among all of the pages on your site Use HTML titles that are unique to each page you produce and are both concise and catchy Use a good meta description that is unique for each one of your pages. This helps attract visitors to click on your pages in search results. Write clearly Ensure that your site’s pages load quickly and provide a good user experience Of course, there is much more to it than this but following these basics when working on your site will get you pretty far. Having an SEO expert on your team or within your agency partner will help you tackle many of the smaller details and prevent you from making dumb mistakes. Learn how social media and email work in Japan In 2015, SEO and social media marketing go hand in hand. Users in Japan interact with many of the social networks that you are already familiar with but, in some cases, use them differently. There are also some networks that exist in Japan only and others that are from the US that have very small audiences in Japan. I’ll also touch on native advertising and email. Facebook Facebook took a little longer to gain traction in Japan than it did elsewhere but it is the dominant social network in Japan now. In addition to all of the ways it is used outside Japan, it is used quite heavily for business. Twitter Japan has always been a huge market for Twitter and remains so today. The usage patterns are roughly similar although there are some differences that could easily fill another article. Google Plus Hardly used in Japan. LinkedIn It’s slowly growing but it still has a very small audience in Japan. Facebook is used instead. The reason for its slow growth in Japan has been tied to a cultural distaste for publicizing your work history. This is seen as an indication of job-seeking behavior, which is frowned on in a Japanese business culture that prefers to see long-term loyalty from its employees. Pinterest Pinterest has not really caught on yet in Japan. Instagram Instagram is used heavily in Japan and in some ways fills the role that Pinterest fills in the US and other Western markets. Instagram is also used as a sort of poor-man’s ecommerce catalog for independent artisans, due to its ease of use in publishing visual content. Hatena Hatena is a popular social bookmarking service that is native to Japan. In certain industries, performing well on Hatena can drive a ton of traffic. Line Line is a subsidiary of Naver, the Korean web portal, but the subsidiary is Japanese and Line is one of Japan’s greatest success stories for social networking. Line is a messaging app that has many features that are similar to WhatsApp and Viber but goes even further in terms of customization, voice and audio capabilities and digital goods. The company makes massive amounts of money through its collaboration with corporations and this can be a good way for consumer-facing brands to build their audience in Japan. Mixi Almost a footnote now for the mainstream web, Mixi was once the dominant social network in Japan. They took too long to innovate while Facebook was catching up and are mostly relegated now to certain customer niches. Buzz media and native advertising Sites like Buzzfeed in the US have been phenomenally successful and Japanese imitators are starting to catch up. More importantly from the advertiser and publisher perspective as a whole, there is a great deal of interest and investment in native advertising in Japan. Email Email in Japan, from a marketing perspective, in terms of technology and techniques, is still quite outdated when compared with the latest in the US market. There is still no simple tool like MailChimp that has gained mass adoption and companies are not yet investing heavily in segmentation and audience targeting capabilities. What this means is that mass emails are still sent out with very little in the way of personalization. Of course, there is nothing preventing savvy marketers from using advanced tools from the US, so in some ways, this can put you at an advantage. Track your results and make plans to improve For the basics in tracking content-centric SEO campaigns, the following items are worth tracking: Keyword rankings for your site and competitor sites on the search engines you care about (daily) Visits, conversions, page views, bounce rate, ecommerce sales by page How effectively your site and content is getting indexed by the search engines Ratio of branded searches to unbranded searches Overall search volume trends in your market Social engagement and market share for your site vs. your competitors vs. the market as a whole Setting all of this up can be quite a challenge but fortunately there are a wide variety of tools available in order to make it feasible. For best results, spend some time grouping your content and keywords into groups so you can further analyze your performance and assign responsibilities to the right people. It can also be helpful to use a workflow tool so you can organize your projects and ensure that everybody is focused on the right priorities. Conclusion Succeeding in Japan (or any new market) is a long-term investment that you should rightly expect to spend years (three at a minimum) working on in order to achieve success. Figuring out ahead of time if this timeline is something that you’re willing to invest in is critical because if you don’t take this long term view, you’ll just end up wasting time and resources. If you are committed to Japan and you take a disciplined approach, then you have a good shot at being rewarded with a strong position and a solid revenue stream for your business as you continue to expand internationally. For many international companies, Japan represents the second largest portion of their income and can provide a useful hedge against the changes of their domestic economies. This post SEO in Japan: a how-to guide appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 01:21:24 +0000
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