Your store ranks on Rakuten. Your own domain earns nothing.

Most stores selling in Japan see measurable own-domain organic revenue movement within 90 to 120 days for mid-competition Japanese-language category keywords. Google Japan responds to technical and content improvements at roughly the same pace as global Google. Yahoo Japan Shopping search can show movement faster for listed products. The diagnostic identifies which pages have the best short-term own-domain opportunity and we prioritise those first.

Yes. Shopify has strong market presence in Japan and we work with Shopify stores regularly. Japan-specific Shopify considerations include locale settings for Japanese language storefronts, hreflang tag implementation for bilingual stores, yen currency formatting in GA4 ecommerce tracking, and Japanese-language schema in structured data. We handle all of these as part of a standard Japan engagement.

Yes. WooCommerce with WPML or TranslatePress is a common setup for bilingual Japanese and English stores. We handle hreflang implementation in the WooCommerce multilingual setup, Japanese-language schema deployment, crawl budget management for translated variant URLs, and GA4 ecommerce tracking with correct language and currency attribution. WooCommerce gives more direct technical control than Shopify for Japan-specific configurations.

Japanese keyword research covers hiragana, katakana, and kanji variants for each product term. The same product can be searched in all three character sets, with volume distribution varying by category and buyer demographics. For example, food products are predominantly searched in hiragana and kanji; electronics often in katakana (especially for foreign brand names) or a mix; fashion in both katakana and kanji. We conduct keyword research natively in Japanese rather than translating English keyword lists, and we validate search volumes using Japanese market data from Google Keyword Planner and Yahoo Japan's keyword tools.

Japanese product catalogues typically have more specification detail than equivalent English-language catalogues — size charts in Japanese measurements, material quality grades, and colour names in Japanese. These generate large numbers of variant URLs. We manage crawl budget through robots.txt parameter exclusions, canonical tags on variant pages, and sitemap configuration. The goal is to ensure Google's crawl budget reaches the canonical category and product pages, not the specification variant combinations.

We start with a paid search diagnostic at a fixed fee — this gives you a full picture of the store's own-domain organic opportunity before committing to a monthly engagement. Monthly eCommerce SEO engagements for Japan start at ¥150,000 per month for smaller stores and typically run from ¥250,000 to ¥400,000 per month for stores requiring bilingual content creation, full technical scope, and marketplace channel strategy. Pricing depends on catalogue size, platform, bilingual requirements, and current technical state. The diagnostic determines the right scope.

We work with both. The most effective approach is to optimise own-domain organic SEO and marketplace listings in parallel rather than treating them as competing channels. For Rakuten Ichiba, this means Rakuten ichiba SEO — item title optimisation, shop page content, and internal Rakuten search ranking factors — alongside own-domain Google Japan SEO. For Amazon Japan, product title and backend keyword optimisation for A9 runs alongside own-domain SEO. The goal is to grow own-domain organic revenue without disrupting existing marketplace performance — and over time, to increase the percentage of revenue coming from the own domain where margins are higher.

Yes. Bilingual SEO for Japanese and English requires correct hreflang tag implementation, separate keyword research for each language market, and content that meets the expectations of each market's consumers — Japanese consumers expect significantly more specification detail and trust signals than English-language buyers. Technically, we implement hreflang tags in the HTML head or XML sitemap, confirm correct page pairing in Google Search Console's International Targeting report, and audit for common errors (missing x-default, incorrect region codes, broken return tags). Japanese pages require Japanese-language schema in structured data fields — not just Japanese page content — for rich results eligibility on Google Japan. We conduct Japanese keyword research natively, and content is written or commissioned in Japanese, not machine-translated from English.