If you have a physical presence in Japan — a store, a clinic, a restaurant, an office that takes visitors — local search is usually the fastest return available to you. It is also the part of Japanese SEO where English-language guides are most reliably out of date.
Here is what the local layer actually looks like in Japan in 2026, and what to do about it.
Start with the correction
Most English guides to Japanese local SEO tell you to list your business on Yahoo! JAPAN Local. That service — Yahoo!ロコ — shut down on 27 March 2024.
The tool that replaced it is Yahoo!プレイス (Yahoo! Place). It is free, and the listings you submit through it appear in Yahoo! JAPAN search results and on Yahoo! Maps. If a vendor’s proposal mentions Yahoo! JAPAN Local, you have learned when their Japan material was last checked.
The four surfaces that matter
Three of the four are not Google properties at all, which is the same structural point covered in how people actually search in Japan.
| Surface | Cost | Worth it when |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | Free | Always. This is the majority of the opportunity. |
| Yahoo!プレイス | Free | Always. It is free and it feeds Yahoo! search and Yahoo! Maps. |
| Category platforms (Tabelog, Hot Pepper Beauty, Ekiten and similar) | Free tier, paid plans | Category-dependent, and in some categories non-negotiable. |
| Your own Japanese location page | Your time | Always. It is the only surface you fully control. |
The third row is the one foreign companies underestimate. In several Japanese consumer categories, the category platform is where the decision happens — restaurants on Tabelog, salons on Hot Pepper Beauty. Ranking first on Google while being absent or poorly presented on the platform your buyers actually use is a common and expensive mistake.
Getting your details right in Japanese
Name, address and phone consistency matters everywhere. In Japan it is harder than it looks, because there are more legitimate ways to write the same thing.
Your business name
A foreign brand in Japan usually has at least three written forms in circulation: the Latin alphabet original, a katakana transliteration, and sometimes a translated or abbreviated form. Pick one canonical form, use it everywhere, and make sure it is the one Japanese customers actually type. Check the search volume for each variant before deciding — the answer is not always the one your head office prefers.
Do not stuff keywords into the name field. Japanese users notice, and it violates Google’s guidelines the same way it does anywhere.
Your address
Japanese addresses run largest-to-smallest — postal code, prefecture, city, district, block, building — the reverse of the Western order. Write it the Japanese way, in Japanese, and write it identically on every surface. A Latin-alphabet address on your website and a Japanese one on your listings is a mismatch that costs you nothing to fix and something real to leave broken.
Include the building name and floor. In dense Japanese cities, a customer who cannot find the entrance is a customer who does not arrive.
Your hours
Set the special holiday hours. Japan has a dense calendar of national holidays plus New Year and Obon closures, and Japanese customers check before travelling. Listings that are wrong during Golden Week are wrong at exactly the moment they are being read most.
Reviews: fewer, later, and heavier
Japanese customers write fewer reviews than customers in many Western markets, and the ones they write tend to be more detailed and more measured. Three consequences follow.
- Your review count will grow slowly. Benchmark against Japanese competitors in your category, not against your home market.
- A single negative review carries more weight when the total is small. Respond to it, in Japanese, in a register that does not sound defensive.
- Asking works, but the ask has to be light. Aggressive review solicitation reads badly in Japan and can backfire in public. Incentivised reviews violate platform policy and are worse than useless.
Never buy reviews. It is detectable, the platforms act on it, and in Japan the reputational cost when it surfaces is severe.
The location page you control
This page is where local intent and organic content meet. The writing standard for it is the same one used sitewide — see writing Japanese SEO content.
One page per location, in Japanese, containing:
- Address in Japanese order, plus the nearest station and walking time. Station-and-minutes is how Japanese people locate a place — “3分” from a named station tells a Japanese reader more than a map does.
- Hours, holiday closures, phone number in Japanese format.
- LocalBusiness structured data, with the address matching your listings exactly.
- Photographs of the actual entrance. Not a stock interior — the entrance, as it looks from the street.
Competing with large Japanese companies
This comes up constantly, and the honest answer is that you do not beat them on the head terms. You beat them on specificity.
- Station-level and neighbourhood-level queries are winnable in a way that city-level queries are not.
- Being the specific thing beats being the general thing. A large chain covers a category broadly. You can own a narrow intersection of category, location and situation completely.
- Foreign-language capability is a differentiator worth stating if you have it — but state it in Japanese, on a Japanese page, because the person searching may be a Japanese customer looking for somewhere to bring an overseas colleague.
Common questions
Do I need a Japanese phone number?
For a local listing, yes in practice. A foreign number undermines the listing and deters Japanese callers.
Is Yahoo!プレイス worth the effort if Yahoo!’s search share is small?
It is free and it takes an afternoon. Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! search still reach a meaningful audience, weighted toward older users. The cost-benefit is not close.
Should we pay for a category platform listing?
Category-dependent. Look at where the top Japanese results for your category actually sit. If the platform occupies the results your buyers see, treat the paid listing as a distribution cost rather than as SEO.
Working on Japan?
We are a small Japanese SEO practice working with companies entering the Japanese market. Research, content and structured data are produced natively in Japanese. The wider sequence is in our Japan market-entry SEO guide. More about how we work.
Sources
- Yahoo!ロコ service termination, 27 March 2024 — Yahoo!プレイス お知らせ
Last reviewed: August 2026.
