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Japan | Japanese SEO and PPC - Did you know?

Population:	127.4 million
Area:	377,835 km²
Capital:	Tokyo
Language:	Japanese
Men:	48.7%
Women:	51.3%
Households:	48 million
Currency:	Yen (JPY)
Internet:	.jp
Internet Users:	96.3 million
Major Search Engine:	www.google.co.jp www.yahoo.co.jp www.baidu.com
Major Social Media:	http://mixi.jp/ http://gree.jp http://www.mbga.jp/.pc/
Major Mobile Platforms:	NTT docomo, au by KDDI, Softbank mobile, willcom
Broadband Penetration:	47.9%
Mobile Usage:	114.917 million mobile phones
Online Buying Behaviour:	Rakuten has pursued a "shopping mall" strategy, providing all the services that enable merchants big and small to set up digital shop fronts, including hosting their sites, broking their advertising and processing their payments. This greatly simplifies things for both seller and buyer. There are around 90 million internet users among Japan's population of 127 million; a massive two-thirds use Rakuten. Online retailing, though growing fast, remains small in Japan at a mere $30 billion a year in sales (excluding digital downloads and travel), but Rakuten handles nearly one-third of all transactions. Now the company is using its strength at home to go abroad.
How are they Buying:	Credit card, Yahoo easy payment, PayPal, bank transfer

1.Localisation. First and foremost, search engines from Google, through to Baidu in China, to Yandex in Russia, prefer localisation. In order to do well in competitive markets you need to analyse both, your local and global competition in each target market. For example, some search engines prefer that sites are hosted locally, with country-specific domain names.

2. Don't just translate your keywords – think like your target audience. Don't base keyword research solely on translations from English to a particular language - neither for PPC nor SEO. Oban recently found that there was a 'perfect' German translation of a technology term but it had only 140 searches a month on it. OBAN Multilingual's German team identified an alternative term, which had over 4,000,000 searches a month.

3. Socialise efficiently – it's not all Facebook and Twitter. Social Media can be a great marketing tool; however, it is used very differently across the globe. The below SNS Chart shows that global Social Networking platforms are as varied as the people using them. For example, in China QQ.com is by far the most popular social networking site, whereas our good old friends Facebook and Twitter are banned. To maximise the effects of social media marketing, make sure that your social media strategy is specifically tailored to the region and market you are targeting.

Japan | Japanese SEO and PPC - Did you know?

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