SEO services in Japan: Japanese SEO and MEO for Tokyo, Osaka and all 47 prefectures

Who we are, and which businesses in Japan our SEO suits

BtechWaleTech is a team of three engineers working from India, and search engine optimisation is part of our weekly work. Another of us leads technical SEO: crawling, indexing, structured data, site speed and deployment, plus the AWS and data work behind reporting. One of us is the full stack developer who actually changes templates, redirects, forms and page code when an audit finds a problem. The third of us manages delivery and handles data analysis and automation, including the scripts that turn Search Console exports into a readable monthly report. You message these three people directly. No account manager rewrites your request, and nothing is passed on to a subcontractor.

Some things we are not, and it is better to say them first. We have no office, business registration, staff or address in Japan, so we cannot honestly call ourselves a Tokyo SEO team, and there is no map listing of our own in Japan either. We are not a Google Partner or any other certified partner, we hold no SEO awards, and you will find no case studies, testimonials or client logos on this page. We also do not promise positions. Anyone who guarantees first place for a competitive Japanese keyword is either selling keywords nobody searches for or taking risks with your domain.

The biggest practical point is language. We work in English and do not write natural Japanese. For SEO that means a clean split of roles: we handle keyword research, search intent analysis, page structure, briefs, technical work and measurement, and a native Japanese writer, one of your staff or a translator you trust writes and approves the Japanese text. We never publish machine-translated Japanese and call it optimised. Titles and meta descriptions in Japanese go through the same native review as body copy, because a clumsy title in the search results costs clicks every single day.

This setup suits some businesses much better than others. It works well for foreign-owned companies and their Japanese subsidiaries; startups in Tokyo and Fukuoka with bilingual teams; hotels, ryokan, tour operators and experience providers who want visitors from Korea, Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong and English-speaking countries; manufacturers and food producers who sell abroad; bilingual professionals such as visa consultants, international real estate agents and English schools; and Japanese companies that already have a writer or content team and need the technical and structural side done properly. If you want an agency at your office every week for meetings in Japanese, a Japanese firm is the better choice, and we will tell you so.

The full range of IT services we offer to businesses in Japan, from websites and apps to custom systems, is summarised on our Japan page. This page goes deep on search only: how SEO works in Japan, what it typically costs, what we do for our fee, and what to check before hiring anyone for it, including us.

What our SEO service for Japan includes

Technical SEO audit and fixes. We crawl the site the way a search engine does and compare what we find with what Google Search Console reports: pages that are excluded from the index, duplicate URLs without a clear canonical, redirect chains, broken internal links, missing or invalid structured data, slow templates and pages that only render with JavaScript. The difference from many SEO reports is that we fix these in the code ourselves, on sites where you give us access, instead of handing your web company a spreadsheet and waiting months.

Japanese keyword research and page planning. We build a keyword map across kanji, hiragana, katakana, romaji and English, group the terms by search intent, and assign each group to one page so your pages stop competing with each other. The map is delivered in Japanese with an English gloss for every group, so both your team and ours understand exactly why each page exists.

Content structure and briefs. For every planned page we write a brief with the target keywords, the questions the page must answer, a heading outline, internal links, the structured data it needs and who should supervise it. Your native writer drafts from the brief; we then check the structure, titles and markup and publish.

MEO and local search. We guide your Google Business Profile setup, categories, services, photos, posts and review process, keep your business details consistent across your site and the portals, and build location pages that support the profile. More on this in the MEO section below.

Programmatic SEO sites. For businesses with structured data, such as property listings, branches, service areas or large catalogues, we build SEO websites of 299+ pages from US$300 (about ¥47,000), generated from your data with safeguards against thin pages. The build side is the same engineering described on our web development service page.

International and inbound SEO. For hotels, tour operators, shops and exporters: a version of the site for each target language, whether English, Simplified or Traditional Chinese or Korean, each on its own URL path, linked with hreflang and researched market by market.

Ecommerce SEO. Category architecture, product data, Merchant Center feeds and seasonal gift pages for your own store, planned to work alongside Rakuten, Amazon and Yahoo! Shopping rather than against them.

SEO for website renewals. Redirect mapping, staging checks and post-launch monitoring when you redesign, migrate from a builder or change domain. If the renewal itself is on the table, our website developer page for Japan covers the build.

AI search visibility and reporting. Structure that helps AI Overviews and assistants quote your pages accurately, and a monthly report that shows what changed, what we did and what we plan next. Our general approach to search, outside Japan too, is set out on the SEO services page.

How people search in Japan: Google, Yahoo! JAPAN, Bing, maps and portals

Google is the main search engine in Japan, and Yahoo! JAPAN, which still has a loyal audience, uses Google's search technology to produce its web results. In practice that means one set of SEO work covers both. The results page on Yahoo! JAPAN looks different, because Yahoo mixes in its own news, shopping and Q&A services, but the organic listings follow the same signals. When we check rankings for a site in Japan, we look at both, because some older and non-technical audiences still start from the Yahoo! JAPAN portal every day.

Bing matters more than its share suggests. Edge on Windows sends searches to Bing unless someone changes the setting, which puts it in front of many office workers, and some AI assistants draw on Bing's index. We verify every site we work on in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit sitemaps there and support IndexNow where the platform allows it, so new and changed pages reach Bing quickly.

Local searches often end on a map rather than a website. Someone looking for a dentist, a ramen shop or a hair salon near a station usually sees Google's map results first, which is why Japanese marketers treat MEO as its own discipline. At the same time, specialised portals rank for huge numbers of local and category searches: 食べログ (Tabelog) for restaurants, ホットペッパービューティー (Hot Pepper Beauty) for salons, SUUMO for property and じゃらん (Jalan) for travel. A small business rarely outranks those portals for broad searches, so part of our job is choosing where your own site can realistically win and where your portal listing should do the work.

Discovery also happens away from search engines. Younger customers often find shops and products on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube before they search the name, and LINE, with more than 100 million monthly users in Japan according to LY Corporation, is where many businesses keep in touch with customers after the first visit. SEO does not replace those channels, but it catches the moment when someone who heard your name types it into a search box, and that branded search should always land on your own well-structured site.

Finally, answers increasingly appear before the links. Google has shown AI Overviews for Japanese queries since August 2024, and people ask chat assistants for recommendations. We cover what that changes, and what it does not, in the AI search section further down.

Japanese keyword research: four scripts, loanwords and intent words

Japanese keyword research is harder than English keyword research for one simple reason: one concept can take several written forms, and search demand and results differ from form to form. Japanese uses kanji, hiragana and katakana together, borrows English words in katakana, and people also type romaji and plain English. Google treats many variants as equivalent, but not all of them, so we check the actual results page for each important variant instead of assuming.

Some examples show the problem. A dental clinic needs to know whether people near it type 歯医者 (the everyday word for dentist) or 歯科 (the formal word used in clinic names); in practice both matter, for different pages. A web company must cover ホームページ制作, HP制作 and Web制作. A moving company sees 引っ越し and 引越し, two spellings of the same word. A ramen shop may be found through ラーメン in katakana or らーめん in hiragana, and the SEO industry itself is searched as SEO対策, literally SEO measures, more often than as SEO alone.

Area words matter as much as the service. Japanese local searches often combine a prefecture, city, ward or station with the service, such as 渋谷駅 歯医者 (dentist near Shibuya Station) or 梅田 美容院 (hair salon in Umeda). The station name is often more important than the ward, because people live and work around train lines. For real estate, recruitment and home services, the combination of station, line and service defines which pages a site needs.

Then there are intent words. Japanese searchers add short modifiers that tell you exactly what stage they are at, and each one calls for a different kind of page:

• 費用 and 料金 (cost, fees) and 相場 (market rate): the searcher is budgeting. A price page with clear tax-inclusive ranges and what drives them usually beats a vague service page.
• 比較 (comparison) and おすすめ (recommended): the searcher is shortlisting. Comparison tables and honest criteria help, and claims such as number one need objective evidence under Japanese advertising rules.
• 口コミ and 評判 (reviews, reputation): the searcher wants other people's experience. Review platforms and your Business Profile often rank here, so reviews matter more than your own words.
• とは (what is) and やり方 or 方法 (how to): the searcher is learning. Guides and glossary pages win these, and they are the pages AI Overviews quote most readily.
• 近く (nearby) and station names: the searcher wants to go somewhere now. The map results and a fast mobile location page matter most.
• 格安 (cheap) and 無料 (free): the searcher is price sensitive. Worth targeting only if your offer genuinely fits, otherwise the traffic will not convert.

Our sources are Google Keyword Planner, your own Search Console queries, Google's autocomplete suggestions (サジェスト), related searches, questions people ask on Yahoo! Chiebukuro and similar Q&A sites, and the questions your staff hear on the phone every week. Search volume tools are noticeably less precise for Japanese long-tail terms than for English ones, so we treat their numbers as a rough guide and weigh them against real query data from your site.

The result is a keyword map: each row is a group of related Japanese terms with an English explanation, the intent, the page that should target it, and whether that page exists yet. Your writer works from it, and we use it every month to decide what to build or improve next.

What SEO costs in Japan in 2026, and what we charge

Japanese SEO quotes vary enormously, so a reference point helps. The market figures in this table are drawn from 2026 price guides published by Japanese agencies and comparison sites such as Web幹事, システム幹事 and 発注ラウンジ, which collect and summarise what Japanese SEO and web companies charge. Treat them as the usual spread in the market; an individual quote depends on how big your site is and how contested your keywords are. The right-hand column shows where our plans start, with yen worked out at ¥155 to the dollar.

Reading the table fairly. The content row is where a like-for-like comparison is hardest. A Japanese content programme includes Japanese writers, editors and often supervising professionals; ours does not, because we do not write Japanese. If you need ten articles a month, budget for a native writer on top of our monthly fee. Even with a writer's fees added, the total can stay well below a Japanese content programme, because the planning, structure and technical work that make those articles rank are covered by the monthly plan.

Currency. Our prices are set in dollars, so the yen figure moves with the market; during September 2026 a dollar bought somewhere between about ¥153 and ¥157. Companies that budget in yen can ask for the quote itself to state a yen amount, and that figure then holds for the agreed scope whatever the rate does.

Starting prices, not bargains in disguise. A starting price covers a clearly defined scope for a site of ordinary size. Large sites, several languages, many locations or a heavy backlog of technical problems raise the monthly figure, and we say so in the quote before any work begins. The full price list is on our pricing page.

What each starting price buys, and why ours are lower

A starting price only means something if you know what it covers. These are the plans most relevant to SEO work in Japan, and what each one typically includes.

• Monthly SEO from US$150/mo (about ¥23,000/mo): ongoing SEO for one site of ordinary size. In a typical month that means technical checks and fixes, keyword and page planning, briefs for your writer, on-page optimisation of new and existing pages, Business Profile guidance for one location, and a report with a change log. Several locations, several languages or a very large site raise the monthly figure.
• SEO website from US$300 (about ¥47,000): a structured site of 299+ pages planned around search intent, such as a property company with pages for many stations and property types, a service business with pages per city, or a distributor with a deep category tree. Keyword planning, templates, schema, internal linking, sitemaps and deployment are included; the data and the Japanese template text come from you.
• Static website from US$150 (about ¥23,000): a fast site of up to 100 pages with clean SEO foundations from day one, for businesses whose current site is so slow or outdated that fixing it costs more than replacing it.
• Maintenance from US$120/mo (about ¥19,000/mo): updates, fixes, security, backups and speed checks for sites we build, with the first two months after launch free.

Why our prices are lower. Think about what a Japanese SEO invoice pays for. A good part goes to premises in an expensive city, to account and sales staff who never touch your site, and sometimes to a chain of partner firms and freelance writers who each take a cut. For some buyers that is money well spent, particularly when one supplier must provide Japanese copy and run workshops in person. Our structure is simpler: the three people who answer your messages are the people who do the work, from their own desks in India, with no premises, sales function or partner chain to fund.

What you give up. You give up Japanese-language meetings, in-person visits and a single supplier for both strategy and Japanese copy. You gain engineers who implement their own recommendations, direct contact with the people doing the work, and a monthly fee that leaves room in your budget for a good native writer. If the balance works for you, contact us with your site address and we will reply with a first look and a written scope.

How SEO is priced in Japan: monthly retainers, pay-for-performance and per-article fees

Japanese SEO companies sell their work in a few standard ways, and the model matters as much as the price. Understanding them makes quotes easier to compare, including ours.

Monthly consulting retainers. The most common model: a fixed monthly fee, usually with a minimum contract period, for analysis, advice and reporting. The key question is who implements the advice. Many consulting contracts deliver recommendations while your web company or your staff make the changes, which means results depend on how quickly someone else acts. Ask for a sample report and a list of what the consultant will change directly.

Pay-for-performance (成果報酬型). Here you pay only when chosen keywords rank, typically a daily or monthly fee for each keyword while it sits inside an agreed ranking band. It sounds low-risk, but it creates the wrong incentives. The vendor has every reason to choose keywords that are easy to rank and rarely searched; a top-ten ranking for a phrase nobody types brings no customers. Fees can rise just as rankings you would have earned anyway arrive, and some vendors use purchased links to reach targets quickly, leaving the risk of a manual action on your domain after the contract ends. If you consider this model, insist on choosing the keywords yourself and ask in writing what link building methods are used.

Per-article content fees. Content agencies charge per article, commonly ¥30,000 to ¥100,000 depending on length, research and whether a qualified professional supervises it. Check whether keyword research is included, how many revisions you get, who owns the text, and whether each article fits a plan or is simply volume. Twenty unconnected articles rarely do as much as five that answer the questions your buyers actually ask.

Fixed-price technical audits. A one-off audit, commonly around ¥200,000 to ¥300,000, gives you a list of issues. It is useful if you have developers ready to implement it, and much less useful as a document that sits in a shared folder.

Our model. We charge a flat monthly fee from US$150/mo (about ¥23,000/mo) for a written scope that includes implementation. There are no ranking-based fees, no link packages and no per-keyword pricing. We report on impressions, clicks and enquiries alongside rankings for a sample of terms, because rankings alone are a poor measure of what SEO is worth to a business.

Technical SEO for Japanese websites

Character encoding. Every page, feed, sitemap and form should use UTF-8. Older Japanese sites and back-office systems sometimes still use Shift_JIS or EUC-JP, which causes garbled text (文字化け) when pages are shared, when forms send email, or when product feeds and CSV exports move between systems. We find mixed encodings during the audit and convert them in one controlled step.

URLs. A URL may contain Japanese, but paste it into an email or chat and every character is escaped: one kanji becomes a nine-character code such as %E6%9D%B1, and a four-character slug turns into three dozen symbols. Search engines read either form, and neither helps or hurts rankings by itself. Our default is a short slug in English or romaji, with the Japanese keyword carried by the title and the headings, because those links survive being shared, printed and typed. Whatever format you choose, the rule that outweighs the choice is to redirect every old address before a format ever changes.

Language markup. The html element should declare lang="ja" on Japanese pages, and English phrases or product names inside Japanese text can carry their own lang attribute. That helps screen readers pronounce text correctly and removes ambiguity for search engines. Bilingual sites need hreflang between language versions, covered in the international section.

JavaScript rendering. Sites built as single-page applications often send an almost empty page and build the content in the browser. Google can render JavaScript, but it takes extra time and resources, and many other crawlers, including a number of AI crawlers, do not run it at all. We prefer server-side rendering or static generation for any page that should rank, and we check what the raw HTML contains, not just what the browser shows.

Core Web Vitals with Japanese fonts. A complete Japanese typeface is a heavy download, because it has to cover kana plus thousands of kanji, and loading one on every page delays Largest Contentful Paint and can shift the layout when it finally arrives. Our fixes are to rely on the Japanese fonts already installed on phones and computers, or to cut the web font down to only the characters the site uses, to control font-display, and to reserve the space images and banners will occupy. Third-party tags are the other common problem on Japanese sites: chat widgets, heatmaps, retargeting tags and campaign scripts pile up over the years and slow down Interaction to Next Paint. We list every tag, its owner and its purpose, and remove the ones nobody can explain.

Duplicate URLs and crawl waste. Common causes are www and non-www versions, http and https, index.html paths, trailing slash variants, tracking parameters and, on property and ecommerce sites, filter combinations that create near-infinite URLs. Some older Japanese sites also run a separate smartphone site under a path such as /sp/. We consolidate with redirects and canonicals, block crawl traps, and keep sitemaps limited to pages you actually want indexed.

Structured data. We add Organization, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList, Product, Article and Person markup where it is accurate, with Japanese names and addresses written consistently. Google now shows FAQ rich results for very few sites, so we use FAQ markup for clarity rather than expecting extra space in the results.

Japanese content that ranks: E-E-A-T, supervision and native writers

Google's quality guidelines describe experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, usually shortened to E-E-A-T, and they matter most for topics that affect health, money, safety or legal rights. In those fields, pages backed by a named, qualified person tend to do better in Japanese results, and Japanese publishers have a well-established convention for showing who that person is.

Supervision (監修). The convention is to name a qualified professional as the content's supervisor: a doctor (医師) for medical pages, a lawyer (弁護士) for legal topics, a tax accountant (税理士) for tax questions, a licensed real estate transaction agent (宅地建物取引士) for property, or a registered dietitian for food and nutrition. The supervisor's name, qualification and a short profile appear on the page, and the profile has its own page. We build these supervisor and author pages into the site structure, link them from every article they cover and mark them up with Person structured data. What we never do is invent a supervisor or attach a name to content the person has not actually reviewed.

How the writing works. For each page we write an English brief with the Japanese target keywords, the questions to answer, a heading outline, facts that need a source, internal links and the supervisor needed. Your writer drafts in Japanese. We then check that the headings follow the plan, the title and description fit in search results, internal links and structured data are in place, and the page loads quickly, before publishing. If the writer's draft departs from the plan for a good reason, such as a better way of explaining something to Japanese readers, we adjust the plan, not the writer.

Formats that work for Japanese readers. Japanese buyers read carefully before contacting a business, and pages that answer everything up front convert better. Price tables with tax-inclusive figures, a step-by-step explanation of how the service works (流れ), a frequently asked questions section (よくある質問), clear information about who is responsible, and real examples of your own work all help. We avoid invented testimonials and exaggerated claims, which are both risky under Japanese advertising rules and easy for readers to see through.

AI-written content. AI tools can help a writer research or outline, but Google's spam policies target content produced at scale mainly to manipulate rankings, however it is made. We do not publish unreviewed AI text in Japanese or any other language. Older sites often have the opposite problem: many similar articles written over the years that compete for the same keyword. Merging them into one strong page and redirecting the rest is one of the quickest wins in Japanese SEO.

MEO in Japan: Google Business Profile, reviews and portal sites

In Japan, local search optimisation is usually called MEO (MEO対策), map engine optimisation, because so many local searches end in the map results. For clinics, restaurants, salons, schools, trades and shops, the map pack is often worth more than the first organic result.

The profile belongs to you. Your Google Business Profile must be created and verified by your company at the real address where you serve customers, or as a service-area business if you visit customers instead. Google chooses the verification method, which can include a video or a postcard, and your staff complete it. We give you step-by-step instructions in English with screenshots your team can follow, and afterwards you add us as a manager. We never create profiles in our own account, never use virtual office addresses, and never add keywords to your business name, which breaks Google's guidelines and can get a listing suspended.

What we optimise. The primary and secondary categories, services and products, opening hours including special hours for Golden Week, Obon and the New Year holidays, attributes, photos of the entrance, interior and staff, regular posts, and the link to the right page on your site rather than always the home page. The location page on your website repeats the same name, address and phone number, gives directions from the nearest station and exit, explains parking, and carries LocalBusiness structured data.

Addresses written consistently. Japanese addresses can be written many ways: chome, banchi and go in kanji or with hyphens, full-width or half-width numbers, with or without the building name and floor. Search engines match inconsistent versions reasonably well, but customers and portals copy whatever they find. We pick one canonical form in Japanese and one in English and use them everywhere.

Reviews. Reviews are one of the strongest local signals and one of the most sensitive areas. Ask every customer, not only happy ones, reply politely in Japanese to each review including critical ones, and never offer rewards or discounts in exchange for reviews, which Google's policies prohibit. Japan's stealth marketing rules, in force since October 2023, treat advertising disguised as independent opinion as a misleading representation, so paid or staff-written reviews that pose as genuine customer opinions are a legal risk as well as a breach of Google's rules.

Working with portals. Tabelog, Hot Pepper Beauty, SUUMO, Jalan and similar portals rank for many local searches and bring bookings, but usually charge fees or commissions. We treat them as partners: keep your listings accurate, link them to your own site where the portal allows it, and give customers who find you on a portal a reason to book directly next time, such as a LINE Official Account, a members' page or a direct-booking benefit.

Programmatic SEO for Japan without thin pages

Japan suits programmatic SEO unusually well. People search by station, line, ward and city, the country has well over a thousand municipalities, and many industries have structured data that maps neatly onto those places. A property company, a recruitment business or a home service provider can serve real demand with thousands of pages, if each page is genuinely useful.

Typical structures we build include property pages by prefecture, city, station and property type; service pages by city for moving, cleaning, repairs or legal services; job listings by prefecture and occupation; B2B pages by material, process and industry; and tourism pages by area and season. Our SEO website plan starts from US$300 (about ¥47,000) for 299+ pages, with the data pipeline built so new records create new pages automatically. When the data lives in an existing business system, the integration work is the kind of project described on our software development page for Japan.

The risk is well known. Pages that differ only by a place name are thin content, and Google's spam policies name scaled content abuse, meaning large numbers of pages produced mainly to manipulate rankings, as a violation. Our safeguards:

• Real data on every page. Listings, counts, prices, access times, local facilities or staff, drawn from your database, not filler sentences with a city name swapped in.
• Thresholds. Pages without enough data are not indexed, or are merged into the parent area page, until they have something to show.
• Native template text. The Japanese sentences that frame the data are written by a native writer, in several variants where the structure allows it, and checked in context.
• Hierarchy and breadcrumbs. Prefecture, city, station and detail pages link up and down in a clear tree, with breadcrumb structured data, so search engines and people understand where each page sits.
• Segmented sitemaps and monitoring. Separate sitemaps per page type let us see in Search Console which templates are indexed and which are being ignored, and fix the template rather than guessing.
• Industry rules. Property listings in Japan follow the industry's fair competition code on how details such as walking time from a station are shown, and your listing data must follow it; we build templates that display the fields exactly as your data provides them.

Inbound and international SEO: Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean

Inbound tourism has become one of the strongest reasons to invest in multilingual SEO in Japan. By JNTO's count, 42.68 million international arrivals came in 2025, a record, against 36.87 million the year before, and the three biggest source markets, South Korea, mainland China and Taiwan, each search in a different language and script. Hotels, ryokan, restaurants, tour operators, shops and experience providers can reach those visitors while they are still planning at home, but only if a page in their language answers their questions.

Structure. Each language gets its own URL path, such as /en/, /zh-hans/, /zh-hant/ and /ko/, with the Japanese version at the root or under /ja/. Every page lists its equivalents with hreflang tags using codes such as ja, en, zh-Hans for Simplified Chinese, zh-Hant for Traditional Chinese and ko for Korean, plus an x-default for everyone else. If Taiwan and Hong Kong versions genuinely differ, region codes such as zh-Hant-TW and zh-Hant-HK can separate them. The tags must be reciprocal and point to canonical URLs. A visible language switcher lets people choose, and we avoid automatic redirects by IP address, which can block crawlers from the other versions and frustrate residents who want Japanese.

Each market searches differently. Translation is not keyword research. Visitors from Taiwan and Hong Kong mostly use Google, many Korean travellers also use Naver, and people in mainland China generally cannot use Google at home and plan on domestic platforms instead. Place names, dishes and activities are written differently in each language, and travellers from different markets care about different things, from payment methods to luggage storage. We research keywords per language, and native translators write or adapt the text; we do not publish machine translation.

Practical content ranks. For inbound visitors, the pages that rank and convert answer practical questions: how to get there from the nearest major station or airport, whether cards from overseas are accepted, whether staff speak English, how to book, what the cancellation policy is, and what to expect on arrival. These pages are also the ones AI assistants quote when a traveller asks for recommendations.

Outbound SEO for Japanese exporters. Manufacturers, food producers and craft brands selling overseas need English keyword research, not translated Japanese keywords. Buyers abroad describe products with their own terms, units and standards, and an English page written around those terms, with specifications and export information, does far better than a translated company brochure.

Ecommerce SEO for your own store alongside Rakuten, Amazon and Yahoo! Shopping

METI's market survey sized Japanese consumer ecommerce at ¥26.1 trillion for 2024, a 5.1 percent rise, yet only 9.78 percent of goods sales happened online, which leaves a great deal of headroom. Rakuten Ichiba, Amazon.co.jp and Yahoo! Shopping take a large share of that and rank strongly for product searches. Your own store rarely beats them for a generic product name, and it does not need to.

Where your own store can win. Brand searches, where people type your shop or product name; category and use-case searches, such as gifts for a particular occasion or products for a particular problem; comparison and how-to-choose content; and seasonal gift searches around お中元 (summer gifts), お歳暮 (year-end gifts), Mother's Day and Father's Day. Marketplace listings and your own store work together: the marketplace catches product-name demand, and your store builds the direct relationship and the margin.

Product and category pages. Japanese product names should include the words people search, such as material, size, capacity and use, without keyword stuffing. Prices must be shown including consumption tax. Product structured data with price, availability and reviews helps search engines understand the page, and a Google Merchant Center feed makes products eligible for free product listings in Google Shopping. Category pages need a short, useful introduction written by a native writer, not only a grid of products.

Seasonal pages that keep their value. Gift season pages should live at a permanent URL such as /ochugen/ and be updated each year, rather than creating a new page with a year in the address every season. That way the links and rankings built up last year carry forward.

Platform details. On Shopify we watch for duplicate product URLs created through collection paths, percent-encoded Japanese handles, and slow apps. On WooCommerce and custom stores we manage filters and parameters so they do not flood the index. Every Japanese store also needs a page under the Specified Commercial Transactions Act, with seller details, prices, delivery and returns; it is a legal requirement rather than an SEO feature, but it is also one of the pages careful buyers check before ordering. If your store needs a new build, our website developer page covers it; if your product is a mobile app, its landing pages and store listing are part of the work on our Android and iOS developer page for Japan, and the general approach is on our Android and iOS app development page.

Keeping rankings through a website renewal (リニューアル)

Japanese companies renew their websites regularly, and the renewal (リニューアル) is one of the most common moments for search traffic to fall sharply. The cause is rarely the new design. It is usually changed URLs without redirects, pages that ranked being deleted or merged carelessly, a noindex tag left on from staging, a staging site that got indexed, or new templates that dropped titles, headings and structured data.

Our renewal process follows the same checklist every time:

• Crawl the current site and export every URL, title, heading and canonical before anything changes.
• Export pages with clicks and impressions from Search Console and pages with external links, so we know which URLs carry value.
• Build a one-to-one redirect map from every old URL to its closest new equivalent, using permanent 301 redirects and avoiding chains.
• Keep the content that ranks, even if it is rewritten, and plan where every important keyword will live on the new site.
• Test the new site on a staging server protected by a password, not only by noindex, and check titles, headings, canonicals, hreflang and structured data template by template.
• Launch with the redirects live at the same moment, submit the new sitemap, keep the old sitemap briefly so search engines find the redirects, and use the change of address tool in Search Console if the domain changes.
• Watch indexing, rankings and traffic daily for the first weeks and fix any missed redirect immediately.

We handle renewals from hosted builders such as STUDIO, Wix and Jimdo, from old WordPress themes and from custom sites. If you are choosing a developer for the renewal itself, the build is covered on our page for website development in Japan and our general web development service; the SEO migration work can be done with any developer you choose.

AI Overviews and chat assistants in Japanese search

Google has shown AI Overviews, generated summaries above the regular results, in Japanese since August 2024, and in September 2025 it added Japanese to AI Mode, its conversational search experience. More people also ask chat assistants for recommendations before they search. For informational queries such as what something is or how something works, fewer people may click through; for local, commercial and brand searches, people still visit sites to compare, book and buy.

What helps a page get quoted is the same thing that helps a careful human reader: a direct answer near the top, clear headings that match the questions people ask, facts with sources, tables where comparison matters, a named author or supervisor, and a page that loads fast and can be read without JavaScript. Structured data helps machines understand what the page is about. None of this is a trick, and none of it guarantees inclusion.

There are also technical decisions to make. Your robots.txt file can allow or block specific AI crawlers, and Google offers a separate control, Google-Extended, for use of content in some of its AI models without affecting search indexing. Blocking everything protects content but can make you invisible in assistant answers; allowing everything is simpler. We explain the options and you decide. Proposals such as llms.txt files are cheap to add, but no major search engine has confirmed using them for ranking, so we treat them as optional.

Measurement is improving but still partial. Search Console now has a generative AI performance report, rolled out to all sites by the end of August 2026, which shows how often links to your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country and device. It counts impressions, not clicks; visits from those features are still folded into the overall web search figures. Referrals from other assistants show up in analytics only when the assistant passes a referrer. We track what can be tracked, watch branded search and direct enquiries as indirect signals, and are honest about the rest. If you want to put AI to work inside your own business rather than in search, that is covered on our AI automation engineer page for Japan.

SEO across Japan: all 8 regions and 47 prefectures

Search behaviour in Japan changes with the region. Competition in central Tokyo has little in common with a mid-sized city in Shikoku, and a manufacturer in Aichi needs different keywords from a ryokan in Oita. We work remotely, so we serve businesses in every prefecture the same way, but the SEO plan always starts from where your customers are and how they search. Below is a short guide to each of Japan's eight regions and the SEO work that most often fits there.

Wherever you are based, the process is the same: a first look at your site and the local search results, a written scope, and monthly work you can follow in the reports. For the other IT services we provide in each region, see our overview of IT services in Japan.

SEO in Tokyo and Japan's 20 designated cities

Japan's largest cities have the most competitive search results, and each has its own mix of industries. The table covers Tokyo's 23 special wards and the 20 cities designated by government ordinance, which have ward-level administration of their own. In most of these cities, local searches are made at ward or station level, so city-wide pages are rarely enough on their own.

If your business serves several of these cities, we plan one strong page per city or ward where you have a real presence or real service data, rather than hundreds of thin pages. For city searches in English, such as foreigners looking for services in Tokyo or Osaka, a separate English page per city usually performs far better than a translated copy of the Japanese page.

Rules that shape SEO work in Japan (not legal advice)

SEO content is advertising in the eyes of Japanese law, and several rules affect what a page can say and how data is collected. We are engineers, not lawyers, so the points below explain what we build around; your own adviser confirms what applies to your business.

• Stealth marketing rules. Since October 2023, promotion presented in a way that stops consumers recognising it as promotion counts as a misleading representation under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations. Sponsored articles, influencer posts and affiliate content need a clear label such as 広告 or PR, and staff or paid reviews must not pose as independent opinions. The advertiser, meaning your business, is responsible.
• Claims and comparisons. The same act prohibits representations that make goods or services look much better or cheaper than they are. Claims such as number one, cheapest or most popular need objective evidence that is current and relevant, so we plan comparison pages around facts you can back up.
• Health, cosmetics and supplements. The Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Act (薬機法) restricts efficacy claims for cosmetics, health foods and similar products. SEO content in these niches must be checked against those rules before publishing, and keyword targets that imply medical effects may have to be dropped.
• Clinics. Medical advertising in Japan is regulated under the Medical Care Act and its guidelines (医療広告ガイドライン), and since the amended act took effect in June 2018, clinic and hospital websites have been clearly within that regulation. Before-and-after photos, testimonials and claims about treatments are restricted; we build clinic pages so your practice can follow its own compliance checks.
• Real estate listings. The property industry's fair competition code governs how details such as prices, floor area and walking times are shown, and programmatic templates must display your data accordingly.
• Tags and the Telecommunications Business Act. SEO and analytics work adds scripts to a site, and since June 2023 the act's external transmission rules have obliged in-scope services to tell users which third parties receive their information via tags or SDKs. A company site that simply promotes its own business is often out of scope, while stores and information services may be in it. We keep a written inventory of every tag, who receives the data and why, which makes a disclosure page easy if you need one.
• Personal data and the APPI. Most SEO work runs on aggregated search data and needs no personal information. Where a task would let our India team see form submissions or CRM records, the Act on the Protection of Personal Information treats that as sending data to a third party abroad, so your company needs either the individual's informed consent, which includes explaining the foreign country's data protection system, or a recipient with an equivalent protection system. India's own framework, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, is still being phased in. Our practice is to avoid that access, use dummy records and sign data-handling terms when access cannot be avoided.
• Accessibility. Reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities became a legal duty for private businesses in April 2024 under the Act for Eliminating Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities. On the web, the reference is JIS X 8341-3, which follows WCAG. Much of it overlaps with good SEO: meaningful headings, descriptive alt text, labelled form fields and readable contrast serve screen readers and crawlers at the same time.

If a keyword strategy runs into one of these rules, we tell you and suggest a compliant alternative rather than publishing and hoping. For specific questions, please ask your lawyer, your industry association or the relevant authority; you can also contact us to discuss how a rule affects the technical build.

Working hours in Japan time

We start work at 9 am in India, when it is already 12:30 pm in Tokyo, and finish at 9 pm IST, which is 12:30 am JST. That schedule holds every day of the week on WhatsApp and never moves with the seasons, because Japan and India both stay on standard time all year.

SEO fits this rhythm well. Most of the work, from audits and fixes to keyword plans, briefs and reports, does not need a live meeting. You send questions or approvals in your morning, and answers, fixes or draft briefs are usually ready by your evening. For calls, the Japanese afternoon is the easiest time, and a morning call around 10 am JST can be arranged in advance. The monthly report comes with an optional video call to walk through results and agree next month's priorities.

Hiring an offshore SEO provider for Japan: buying guide and red flags

Offshore SEO can work very well for a Japanese business, and it can go badly wrong. The difference is usually visible before you sign, if you know what to look for. These are the warning signs we would check for in any provider, Japanese or overseas, including us:

• Ranking guarantees (上位表示保証). Rankings are decided by Google, not by any agency. A guarantee usually means easy keywords, risky links or both.
• Link packages. Offers of a fixed number of backlinks per month, private blog networks or link exchanges. Google's spam policies treat these as link schemes, and your domain carries the risk.
• Auto-generated pages. Hundreds of city or keyword pages with the same text and a swapped place name. They may index briefly, then drag down the whole site.
• Machine-translated Japanese. An overseas provider promising to write your Japanese content without a native writer. Japanese readers notice at once, and so do conversion rates.
• Accounts in the provider's name. Your Search Console, analytics, Business Profile, domain and hosting should all be owned by your company. A provider who creates them in its own account can hold your site hostage.
• Rank-only reports. Reports that show positions for a handful of keywords but not impressions, clicks, enquiries or what was actually changed that month.
• A local address that is not really there. Offshore providers sometimes use a virtual office in Tokyo to look local. It is not illegal, but it tells you something about honesty. Ask where the people doing the work sit.
• Long lock-ins and exit fees. Minimum terms of a year or more, fees to remove links the provider placed, or content that remains the provider's property.

Questions worth asking any provider: Who exactly will work on our site, and can we talk to them? Will you implement changes yourself or only recommend them? Which link building methods do you use? Who writes the Japanese text? Which accounts will be in our company's name? What does a monthly report contain? How do we end the contract, and what do we keep? A good provider answers all of these in writing. Our answers are on this page, and our Japan page explains how we work with Japanese businesses on everything beyond search.

Measurement, monthly reports and realistic timelines

What we measure. Google Search Console shows which queries and pages bring impressions and clicks and which pages are indexed. Google Analytics 4 shows what visitors do next, and we set up conversions for the actions that matter to you: form submissions, phone taps, LINE friend additions, bookings or purchases. Business Profile performance data shows calls, direction requests and website visits from the map. Bing Webmaster Tools covers Bing. For a sample of important keywords we also track rankings, as one signal among several.

What the monthly report contains. A short summary in plain English of what changed in search performance and why we think it changed; the change log listing every fix, new page and update we made; issues found and whether they are fixed; and the plan for next month, with anything we need from you, such as a writer's draft or a decision. Reports are built from your own accounts, so you can check every number yourself. The data processing behind the reports is automated with the same kind of tooling described on our AI automation page, which keeps reporting time low and working time high.

Realistic timelines. Technical fixes are usually live within days, and search engines pick them up as they recrawl. New pages are often indexed within days to a few weeks. Meaningful growth in traffic and enquiries typically takes several months, and highly competitive Tokyo searches in fields such as real estate, beauty, medical care and finance can take longer. Local MEO for one location often moves faster. Sites with a history of risky links, thin pages or manual actions need clean-up time before growth starts.

What we need from you. Access to the accounts listed above, a contact who can approve changes, a native writer for new Japanese content, and honest information about your customers, margins and the services you most want to sell. SEO works best when it is aimed at the enquiries that are worth the most to your business, not at traffic for its own sake.