Many foreign companies enter Japan with a translated website and a keyword list converted from English. Then they wait, rankings do not come, and the conclusion is that “Japanese SEO is different” in some mysterious way.
It is different, but not mysteriously. This guide covers what actually decides whether a foreign company ranks in Japan, in the order the decisions come up.
The one decision everything else follows from
In our experience, translated content rarely ranks in Japan. Not because translation quality is poor — often it is excellent — but because a translated page answers the English version of the question.
Three things are local, and all three break translation:
- Query patterns. The words Japanese users type are usually not translations of the words English users type. They are often longer, frequently mix scripts, and cluster around different framings of the same need.
- Search intent. The same nominal keyword can carry a different intent in Japan — comparison-heavy where the English market is transactional, or vice versa.
- The evidence readers accept. Japanese readers often look for different trust signals: named supervision by a qualified professional, explicit company details, specific figures over broad claims.
So our working rule is: research in Japanese, write in Japanese, and let the English site be a separate asset rather than the source text.
Step 1. Decide where the Japanese site lives
Use a subdirectory on your existing domain — example.com/ja/ — unless you have a specific reason not to. In our view, it is the structure that best inherits the authority the main domain has already built. This is the decision that is expensive to reverse, so make it deliberately.
| Option | Works well when | Cost |
|---|---|---|
example.com/ja/ | You want the Japanese pages to inherit the authority of your main domain | Lowest. Usually the right default. |
example.jp or example.co.jp | Trust with Japanese buyers matters more than inherited authority — common for B2C and regulated categories | Starts from zero authority. .co.jp requires a company registered in Japan. |
jp.example.com | Rarely the best of either | Splits authority without the local trust benefit |
For most companies entering Japan, a subfolder on the existing domain is the pragmatic choice. The .co.jp option carries genuine trust weight with Japanese buyers — it is restricted to companies registered in Japan, and many Japanese users know that — but you are starting a new domain from nothing, which typically adds six to twelve months before organic traffic is meaningful.
Whichever you choose, set hreflang correctly between the English and Japanese versions. Mis-set hreflang is one of the most common technical faults we find on foreign companies’ Japanese sites, and it can quietly keep the right page from reaching the right audience.
Step 2. Do keyword research in Japanese, not in translation
Japanese is written in three scripts that mix inside a single query, and users choose between them inconsistently. The same product can be searched as kanji, katakana, hiragana, romaji, or an English loanword — often with different volumes and different intent behind each.
We tested how often translation lands on the right one. On October 7, 2026, we put 24 English category terms, 12 for B2B software and 12 for consumer products, through Google Translate and compared each result with the Japanese phrasing searched most often. The translation matched for 5 of the 24. Across all 24, the most-searched phrasing drew a median of 37.8 times the monthly searches of the translated one: 26.4 times for the B2B terms and 101.8 times for the consumer terms. Sixteen of the 24 terms had a gap of ten times or more. Two examples show the pattern. Google Translate turns “time tracking software” into 時間追跡ソフトウェア, searched about 10 times a month, while Japanese buyers search 勤怠管理システム (attendance management system) about 8,100 times. “Standing desk” becomes the katakana スタンディングデスク, about 9,900 searches a month, but the kanji 昇降デスク (height-adjustable desk) draws about 27,100. The volumes are twelve-month estimates for Japan, September 2025 to August 2026. The full list and method are in our translation test.
What to actually do
- Start from Japanese autocomplete and related-query data, not from a translated seed list.
- Collect every script variant of your core terms and check the volume for each separately.
- Read the top ten results for each target query. In Japan, the SERP usually tells you the expected format — comparison table, ranking list, expert-supervised explainer — more reliably than any keyword metric. When we checked 21 product queries on Google Japan on October 9, 2026, comparison and ranking articles filled 79 of the 132 places on recommendation and review queries.
- Map each query to one page. Japanese sites in competitive categories often lose more to cannibalization than to missing content.
Step 3. Produce the content natively
Write the Japanese content in Japanese from the start, rather than translating the English. This is where many Japan programs quietly fail: the page is grammatically perfect and reads like a translation, because the structure, the examples and the evidence were all chosen for a different reader.
Native does not mean copying the stereotype of the cluttered Japanese website. On September 28, 2026, we measured the Japanese and American homepages of 13 brands that run both: the median Japanese homepage had 85 visible links and the median American one 88. What needs to change is the language, the examples and the evidence, not the density. The full measurements are in our study of Japanese web design.
For scale: we produce over 3,000 Japanese articles a year (2026 run rate), and for YMYL categories — health, finance, legal — we arrange supervision by a qualified professional and can ask more than 2,000 experts, including doctors, lawyers, tax accountants and financial planners. That supervision is not decoration. In our view, named professional supervision is close to table stakes in Japanese YMYL search, and its absence is visible to both readers and search engines.
We cover the mechanics of Japanese content production separately in how to write SEO content for the Japanese market.
Step 4. Get the technical basics right for Japan
Four technical points weigh more in Japan than in most markets: which devices and search engines people use, speed measured from inside the country, Japanese typography, and structured data written in Japanese.
Devices and search engines
Across all devices in August 2026, Statcounter put Google at 62.83% of search in Japan, Bing at 28.47% and Yahoo! JAPAN at 6.98%. Yahoo! JAPAN shows Google’s results, so roughly 70% of Japanese searches return Google’s index, and optimizing for Google covers Yahoo! JAPAN’s organic results as well.
Most Japanese consumer search happens on smartphones, and on smartphones the market is close to a two-engine one: Google and Yahoo! JAPAN together held 96.32% of mobile search in Statcounter’s August 2026 figures. Bing’s recent growth is almost entirely on desktop, 40.01% of desktop search against 0.91% of mobile, and in Japan desktop largely means the office PC. Design the Japanese pages for mobile from the start rather than adapting a desktop layout. If you sell to businesses, also check how your pages appear in Bing. The device split is in our overview of search engines in Japan.
Speed measured from Japan
Test load times from a Japanese location, not from your headquarters. Origin distance and CDN configuration can make a real difference to how quickly the page appears for someone in Tokyo or Osaka.
Line breaks and typography
Japanese has no spaces between words, so long headings can break in awkward places and read as machine output. It is a small detail, but one that many Japanese readers notice.
Structured data in Japanese
Use Organization, Article, FAQ and, where relevant, LocalBusiness markup, and fill it with Japanese values rather than transliterated English ones: the company name as it appears in Japanese, the Japanese address format and a Japanese contact page. If you have stores or offices in Japan, use the same name and address in your Google Business Profile; local SEO in Japan covers the rest.
Step 5. Build the trust signals Japanese buyers look for
E-E-A-T is not a Japan-specific concept, but the signals that satisfy it are often local. Six local signals are worth building early.
A full company profile page
Japanese sites carry a 会社概要 (company profile) page with the registered name, address, representative and founding year. Sparse company pages tend to read as untrustworthy in Japan in a way they do not in the US, so build this page before the blog.
Named authors and supervisors
Put a named author on each article and, in health, finance or legal topics, a named supervisor with credentials. Anonymous corporate content tends to underperform.
One Japanese name, used everywhere
Decide how your company and product are written in Japanese, usually in katakana, and use that form on your site, in Japanese business directories and in every release, so that search engines and readers resolve you as one organization. Many foreign companies already do. On October 9, 2026, we read the 20 most recent PR TIMES releases from companies headquartered outside Japan: 16 linked to a Japanese page on their own site, and 11 gave their company or brand name in katakana or kanji. More on this in our guide to PR in Japan.
Your own explanation in Japanese
If people in Japan already search for your name, someone is already explaining you in Japanese. For the first 30 companies on the Forbes Cloud 100, the median name was searched 4,540 times a month in Japan, and the median results page had seven third-party Japanese explainers in its top ten. When there is demand and no Japanese material from the company itself, Japanese writers usually fill the gap, and they choose the framing. A Japanese page that answers 「○○とは」 (what is X) in your own words is a direct way to take part in that conversation. The full list is in our guide to marketing in Japan.
Numbers with dates and sources
Many Japanese readers are comparison-driven and treat vague superlatives as noise. Prices in yen, customer counts, dates and the source of each figure do more for trust than adjectives.
Links from Japanese sites
In our view, links from Japanese sites still limit how far good pages can rise. The sites worth approaching are usually the comparison articles, industry media and partner pages that already rank for your category, and most of them expect to be contacted in Japanese. Offer them something to cite, such as data you measured yourself, rather than asking for a link. Buying links is against Google’s spam policies in Japan as everywhere else. We cover the approach in link building in Japan.
Step 6. Plan for AI answers, not just rankings
AI Overviews launched in Japanese on August 16, 2024, and AI Mode became available in Japanese on September 9, 2025. We think a meaningful share of Japanese informational queries is now answered above the organic results.
Yahoo! JAPAN’s organic results are supplied by Google, but AI Overviews and AI Mode do not appear on Yahoo! JAPAN, which shows its own AI-generated answers — see Google vs. Yahoo! JAPAN for how that relationship works.
We monitor AI citations weekly on our own Japanese media property. Over a recent six-month window, traffic arriving from AI assistants grew roughly 5.8x, and the property is cited in AI answers about 14,000 times a month as of August 2026. The pages that get cited tend to share a pattern: one clear claim per section, a date, a source, and unambiguous topical scope.
Step 7. Measure it properly
Measure Japan separately from the start, and decide what you will look at before you change anything.
Search Console is your primary source for Google. Yahoo! JAPAN runs on Google’s index, but its queries and clicks do not appear in Search Console, so check Yahoo! JAPAN traffic in your analytics. If you sell to businesses, verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools as well, given Bing’s share of desktop search in Japan.
Segment every report by country and language, because a global property tends to bury Japan. Track whether AI answers cite you for your priority queries, on a fixed schedule; in our view, rankings alone increasingly under-report the outcome. And record a baseline before the first change. It is obvious, often skipped, and hard to reconstruct later.
How long Japan SEO takes, realistically
In our experience, Japanese SEO is no faster than SEO anywhere else, and we would be wary of anyone promising otherwise.
One recent B2B engagement is what we would call a normal good outcome: monthly clicks from Google grew from 56 to 751 over six months. That was a category with real competition, on a site that already existed. A new .co.jp domain in a crowded consumer category would probably be slower.
Since 2020 we have worked with 129 clients across 44 industries, all Japan-based, including Japanese subsidiaries of global companies. The pattern across them is fairly consistent: the programs that work commit to native production for at least two quarters before judging results.
Four ways Japan SEO programs usually fail
- Translating the English site and calling it Japanese SEO. The most common in our experience, and the most expensive.
- Running Japan through a global agency with no Japanese-language research capability. The deliverables often look right in English but are not grounded in Japanese search data.
- Publishing anonymous corporate content in a category that requires named expertise. In YMYL, this can be close to fatal.
- Judging at 90 days. Japanese organic programs rarely show their shape before two quarters.
Common questions
Do I need a .co.jp domain to rank in Japan?
No. A subfolder on your existing domain can rank well. In our view, .co.jp buys trust with Japanese buyers, not ranking ability, and it costs you the authority your main domain already has.
Can I use machine translation with human post-editing?
For documentation and support content, often yes. For content meant to rank and convert, it inherits the structure and evidence of the English original, which, in our view, is the actual problem — not the wording.
Do I need to optimize separately for Yahoo! JAPAN?
Not for organic rankings — Yahoo! JAPAN’s results come from Google’s index. Its advertising, shopping and local listing systems are separate and do need separate work.
How much content do we need?
Fewer, better pages usually beat volume in Japanese search, particularly since AI answers began absorbing thin informational queries. Map one page per intent and resist publishing near-duplicates.
Further reading
Each part of the sequence above has a detailed piece behind it.
The search landscape
- Search engines in Japan
- AI search in Japan
- Getting recommended by ChatGPT in Japan
- Google vs. Yahoo! JAPAN
- Yahoo! JAPAN SEO
Research and writing
- Japanese keyword research
- Translation vs. localization for Japan
- The Japanese content calendar
- Writing Japanese content that ranks
- Content marketing in Japan
Structure and measurement
- Domain structure for Japan
- Japanese web design
- The Japanese WordPress stack
- The Japanese company profile page
- SEO tools for the Japanese market
By who you sell to
- B2B vs. B2C in Japan
- Consumer brands: where the demand sits
- Developer marketing in Japan
- Enterprise IT and the integrator layer
- B2B SaaS and comparison sites
Marketing, PR and media
- Marketing in Japan
- Public relations in Japan
- Japanese media and sponsored article prices
- Advertising in Japan
- Social media in Japan
- Pitching Japanese websites
Trust, distribution and local
Deciding and choosing
Entering Japan from
Working on Japan?
Nihongo Search is published by Amanaut, Inc., a small Japanese SEO and content company in Tokyo working with companies entering the Japanese market. Research, content, entity and structured data work are all produced natively in Japanese, and we measure both rankings and citations in Japanese AI answers.
Sources
- AI Overviews Japanese launch, August 16, 2024 — 窓の杜
- Search engine market share in Japan, August 2026 (all devices, desktop and mobile) — Statcounter Global Stats
- Yahoo! JAPAN’s use of Google search technology and the extension to March 31, 2027 — Web担当者Forum
Last reviewed: October 2026.
