SEO in Japan: a how-to guide

Ray Grieselhuber is the founder and CEO of GinzaMetrics. After participating in Y Combinator in the summer of 2010, he launched the company with the goal to help businesses create authentic interactions with their customers through SEO and content marketing.

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.