Japanese SEO | Japanese Search Engines – Yahoo! Japan

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Japanese SEO, Starting with knowing japanese search engines


Overview Yahoo! Japan

Yahoo! Japan has been founded Janyary 21 in 1996. With over 3,500 employees, its’ head office is located in Roppongi, Minato, Tokyo. The largest stockholder is Softbank, one of the biggest Japanese telecommunications and media corporation.

Status of Yahoo! Japan

Among Japanese search engines, Yahoo has the biggest share. Yahoo! sites attracts more than half of all searches in Japan. Yahoo! sites captured 51% of all search quaries, while Google sites captured 38%. Rakutan Inc. follow them only with 2%.(the data abstracted from comscore.com)



But importance of Yahoo! Japan is not just measured by its search engine volume alone– Google Japan also takes significant share of search volume with fast growth, so you can never ignore Google Japan. What’s more important is to know the reason why Japaneses web users are so close to Yahoo.
Change for Better Search.

Japanese used to be unfamiliar with using search keyword box. So former Yahoo’s main page looked pretty different from theseday’s. Search volume was low, categories tab named ‘Yahoo! service’ which contains shopping travel, news, sports, financial, maps, cook, real estate, blog and much more showed up-front in the main page. Japanese loved it. It enforced Yahoo! Japan’s influence in Japanese search engine market. But as time goes by Japanese have known search engine’s quality and quantity result and get used to keyword search. Google Japan has made contribution to Japanese SEO. As Google had become bigger in Japan, the trend kept growing. Finally in 2008, Yahoo! Japan decided to change its main page noticeably. Now Yahoo!Japan more focuses on providing better search engine result service. It means there is a lot more chance to meet Japanese customer by Japanese SEO campaign.



<Yahoo! Japan main page>

However, still Japanese web users are well experieced in various verticals. You must check out your website’s rank and accessability in those verticals with organic search result’s.

Successful Japanese SEO depends on making full use of them.