Things to Watch Out for when Localizing a Website for Japanese

Successful foreign enterprises trying to enter a new market must be careful about some traps that are connected to localizing their sites. So, let us assume that you have a successful foreign business or you are a fast-growing startup with impressive performance online. Currently, your international SEO agency has developed and highly optimized your site for SEO in English. Based on this effort, your site has generated a lot of organic traffic and many visitors to your site have turned into well-paying customers. So, you plan to go into the global business space and your goal is to enter the Japanese market. To do this, you hire the best local SEO Company to translate your site to Japanese. Although your Japanese colleagues and friends said the site is good after reviewing it, in the end, you get little to no Japanese visitors to your site. So, what happened?

Japanese Keywords: How to Choose the Right Keywords

The likely problem that your translated site may have is that it is optimized for the wrong keywords. This happens when the best local SEO Company that you have engaged translated some words into unpopular keywords. If this is the case, it becomes difficult for users to find your site. Let us look at an example. If Digital Marketing were to be translated into Japanese, many international SEO services providers would translate it into デジタルマーケティング. Interestingly, Google Planner shows two other keywords that are closely related to web marketing with high searches. These:

• デジタルマーケティング – digital marketing (6,000 searches)
• webマーケティング – web marketing (5,400 searches)
• ウェブマーケティング – web marketing (1,600 searches)

What does this mean? If your site is optimized only for digital marketing in Japanese, you will miss out on a large percentage of traffic using other variations (web marketing) to search for the service of your site. That is why it is recommended that you hire a reputable and well-versed international SEO agency when localizing your website.

What are the Major SEO Problems with Japanese Translations?

In most cases, the Japanese translator often does not have the right knowledge about your business. They may also have no idea about digital marketing practices. In other words, they may not know the popular keywords that are mostly used in describing your business. As a result of this, the translator will likely stick to the word he is familiar with not taking cognizance of other popular keywords that users may search on the search engine.

How can you avoid the Translation Problem?

The first thing you must realize is that translators only focus on the accuracy of translating text and they do a great job of it. The next thing is to go a step further and carry out Keyword Research in your target language. Check to see what specific terms are popular for your business topic and incorporate them into your content for SEO.