Japanese SEO,

Developing a fully automated Japanese/English bilingual ecommerce site is very complicated and costly.  For small or medium size businesses, there is a practical alternative.  It is to leave the shopping cart just in English but provide A) a comprehensive shopping guide section customized for the Japanese shoppers written in Japanese, and B) Japanese customer service to answer email inquiries in Japanese.

Here are two examples.

• http://www.hannaandersson.com
• http://www.sigzane.com

Let’s look at Hanna Andersson’s.  It’s one of the best I have seen.
Their Japanese shopping guide includes:

• About Hanna Andersson
• About Hanna’s fabric
• Privacy policy / security
• Return policy
• Back order
• Shipping and custom
• Clothing size charts
• Shoes size charts
• Order status (input order number)
• Online shopping guide
• Error messages
• Payment method
• Q&A
• Free catalog

Both of the sites listed above have a Japanese speaking customer service person who can answer email inquiries in Japanese.  This is a huge plus.  Imagine that you are trying to shop at a site written in Japanese.  If you can write email to them in English, wouldn’t that make you feel much more comfortable to putting your credit number down?  It is not necessary to hire a part-time person for this if you are just testing out the Japan market.  You can outsource it to an email translation service.  We can arrange this for you, so please inquire about it.

Shopping guide and customer service in Japanese (or in another language) are good things to have even if your site is equipped with bilingual shopping cart.  If you can afford it, that would be ideal.  The point here is that with a good shopping guide and customer service in Japanese, a majority of your prospective Japanese customers will be fine in shopping at your site, and you can save by not developing and running a bilingual shopping cart.

When you search using the same words in Yahoo Japan (Yahoo) and
Google Japanese (Google), the results are quite different. It seems
that the greatest difference is that Yahoo gives more weight to
business sites than to community sites.

For example, when I searched for “Hawaii golf,” (in Japanese) I found that the top 4 sites on Yahoo’s top results page are business sites. The 5th ranking site is a a guide book type community site. On Google, in contrast, thefirst 3 sites listed are community sites.

This difference is probably a reflection of Yahoo’s “Business
Express.” For charging a fee of nearly $500 (or even double in
some cases) for registering a site, it ought to provide some ranking boost in return!

For businesses, it’s a good thing that Yahoo Japan is the most used
search engine in Japan. For Japanese language search users, it’s good to be aware of this difference between Yahoo and Google. If you are looking for products and services, use Yahoo. Otherwise, check out Google as well.

The Chinese search engine Baidu launched its official service in Japan in
January. (www.baidu.jp) Baidu is the number one search engine in China, and is aiming to take some share away from Yahoo and Google in Japan. One of its advantages, it claims, is its ability to analyze Kanji characters. Hmm. Maybe that can be an advantage, I thought.

Now, more than a month later, I haven’t come across with any “real” buzz coming from users and so I decided to check it out myself. I opened three browser windows - for Yahoo, Google and Baidu - searched for a few words and compared the results. The first thing that I noticed was that there are no PPC ads on Baidu. The search results - what comes up on the first page or the next - are somewhat similar to those of Google and quite different from those of Yahoo. The page titles are limited to a shorter length on Baidu, which to me is not great. Instead, Baidu shows a date that appears to be the date on which the page was created. That is good. Other than that, I don’t see any major differences.

Overall, I don’t see anything that stands out on the Baidu search engine that is better than its competitors. Well, that doesn’t sound good for Baidu, does it?