Who we are
Japan SEO Bureau is a small, senior practice with one job: Japanese SEO for foreign B2B brands, done the way Japan actually searches — written for Japan, not translated into it.
We work for companies that want to be found and recommended in Japan: in classic search results, and increasingly in the answers AI assistants give Japanese buyers. The view here comes from working hands-on with Japanese search and editorial-grade Japanese content across more than thirty industries.
What we believe
The Japanese SEO most foreign brands buy is the commodity version — translate the content, apply standard on-page work — and it has tended to underperform here for a long time. Japan is a distinct search market: Yahoo! Japan still holds meaningful share, the same term can be written several ways, B2B queries run long and formal, and buyers weight trust and curated recommendation heavily. A literal translation rarely meets that bar.
Two things follow. Ranking and being chosen are not the same thing in Japan. And the work that earns durable rankings — a clear entity, structured and verifiable claims, editorial-grade Japanese, presence in sources Japan trusts — is largely the same work that makes a brand citable in AI answers. So we treat AI visibility as part of doing Japanese SEO properly, not as a separate service sold on top.
What we do — and what we don’t
We do a deliberately narrow set of things, to one standard:
- Japanese keyword and intent research, done in Japanese.
- Editorial-grade Japanese content, written for Japan rather than converted into it.
- Entity and structured-data work, so Japanese search and AI systems can resolve and trust what you are.
- Measurement of where you actually stand — classic Japanese rankings and how AI assistants answer your category’s buyer-intent questions.
We don’t run ad campaigns, resell template localization, or sell a dashboard, and we are not a full-service agency. The focus is the point.
How we work
We are senior and small. You work with the practitioner who does the work, not an account layer, and we take a limited number of clients — the work does not scale by adding juniors. We work mostly in writing: fixed-scope written deliverables and recorded walkthroughs rather than standing meetings, which also suits clients in other time zones.
Most brands reach us after a generic localization or SEO partner left them ranking thinly and largely invisible. That is usually a diagnosis problem, not a Japan problem.
Where to start
A Japanese SEO audit — including AI visibility — is the usual first step. It is fixed in scope, low-commitment, and delivered in writing. It shows how you currently rank and how the major AI assistants answer your category’s Japanese buyer-intent questions: who appears, and why, before you decide anything further.
If that is useful, the audit page is the place to begin.