Best Practices for Japanese SEO

Posted: May 14, 2021

Updated: Feb. 18, 2024

Japan is the world's fourth largest advertising market, following China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In 2019, the Japanese market for online advertising was valued at approximately 1.9 trillion JPY. Driven by mobile ads, further growth is expected in the coming years to reach 2.84 trillion JPY by 2023. Although it's not too late for new businesses to gain a share of the Japanese market, it's important to first learn about its unique background and culture.

Digital Marketing and Advertising in Japan

You may already know that Dentsu is the most powerful advertising agency, especially in traditional media. In recent years, they have further expanded globally through a series of acquisitions. Hakuhodo is the second largest ad agency in Japan, and they have traditionally had a stronger presence in print advertising. In the web media space, CyberAgent has also risen to prominence - originally from Ameba, a popular blogging platform. Global agencies such as Ogilvy and GroupM are present in Japan, and there are also many of boutique marketing agencies that may support your entry into the Japan market.

Seasoned SEO experts may choose to work in-house to launch and optimize a Japanese site. Of course the general rules of international SEO apply - hreflang annotations, locale-specific URLs, etc., but there are also some specific best practices for Japanese SEO.

Japanese Search Engine

If you're coming from English SEO, the good news is that you probably don't need to learn a new search engine. The main search engines used in Japan are Google and Yahoo. These days Google is more popular, and generally young and tech-savvy people are using it. From a Japanese SEO perspective, you can just focus on optimizing for Google, because Yahoo is also powered by Google's algorithm.

Title and Meta Description

Google counts pixel length, not number of characters. Regardless of the language, the maximum title length is 560px, and meta description is 990px. You may know that for English, that's approximately 60 characters for the title and 160 characters for the meta description.

All Japanese characters are 20 pixels, so the maximum title length is 28 characters, and meta description is 49.5 characters, assuming you are only using full-width Japanese characters.

It's common to use the LEN function in Excel to make sure your title and meta description aren't too long, but I prefer using LENB instead. LENB counts the byte length of text in cells. Alphanumeric characters are single byte, and full width Japanese characters are double bytes. The maximum LENB for Japanese SEO titles is 60, and meta description is 135.

Top-Level Domain

The best top-level domains for Japanese sites are .co.jp and .jp.

.co.jp is available for companies registered in Japan, so it indicates that the business is legitimate and trustworthy. But if you're an existing global company with an online presence, you may keep the same corporate site and add a Japanese version, so for example www.example.com/ja/

If you use a generic top-level domain (.com, .net, .info, etc.) you can use the country targeting tool in Google Search Console to tell Google that you are targeting Japan.

URL Structure

From an SEO perspective it's fine to use either Japanese characters or Roman alphabets. I would recommend using Roman alphabets though, because it's easier to share the link via email or social media. URLs that comtain Japanese characters could have encoding issues when they are copied and shared.

You can include Japanese keywords in the URL with Romaji (Roman alphabets to spell Japanese words). For more information about non-English URLs, Google Search Central's John Mueller gives his answer in the video below.

Japanese SEO Tools

As far as I know, there isn't really a Japanese equivalent to the well-loved tools like ahrefs and SEMrush. There is one called mieru-ca but even the cheapest plan is around $1,000 monthly. Some Japanese marketers prefer mieru-ca because the UI is more intuitive for them. However, that is simply an issue of the website design, not related to the accuracy of SEO data provided.

You may still use both ahrefs and SEMrush for Japanese keyword research. The SEO data is not quite as accurate as for English, but I've found it to be good enough. In my experience, SEMrush tends to be better for technical and competitive metrics of Japanese sites. On the other hand, ahrefs is more reliable for search volume. If you have a Google Ads account, you can also use keyword planner to cross check.

On-Page Japanese SEO

Written Japanese uses a mix of 3 different alphabets (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) so there's multiple ways of writing the same search query. Usually there's one that looks and sounds the most natural to a native speaker, and that one will have the highest search volume, while the other variations will have little to no search volume.

Link Building

If you have extensive resources or connections in digital PR, you may try link building through feature articles or interviews in online media. Cold outreach for backlink exchanges isn't a common practice, so your efforts may not pay off as much as they did for English-speaking markets. Otherwise, you can try blogging platforms. At the time of writing, links from note, Qiita, and Wantedly count as dofollow.

Hosting Server

Should you use a Japanese hosting server? There isn't a definitive answer to this question among SEO professionals, but one thing to keep in mind is that the server location can affect page speed, which of course can affect SEO.

According to Google Search Central back in 2007, the web server's IP address is a factor for search results. If you are targeting Japanese SEO, you might have some advantage if you use a rental hosting server located in Japan.

Later in 2015, Google's John Mueller gave a slightly different statement in the webmasters forum.

For search, specifically for geotargeting, the server's location plays a very small role, in many cases it's irrelevant. If you use a ccTLD or a gTLD together with Webmaster Tools, then we'll mainly use the geotargeting from there, regardless of where your server is located. You definitely don't need to host your website in any specific geographic location -- use what works best for you, and give us that information via a ccTLD or Webmaster Tools.

Additional Considerations

Japanese business culture has traditionally valued in-person and phone interactions, and in some industries, it's still uncommon for companies to have sophisticated digital marketing teams. Then there's a chance for foreign companies to swoop in and get an advantage over the local competition for Japanese SEO. Note that there are many other considerations for Japanese SEO not discussed in this post, such as website design and translation quality.