Insights
Notes for overseas teams working out Japan: search share, advertising spend, channels and sequencing. Every figure carries its source, its period and the date we checked it, including the ones that do not flatter a sales pitch.
Published 2 September 2026
Eight fixed questions, three dates, signed out. Answers to list questions were copies of roundup articles; answers to condition questions quoted provider pages that stated the condition plainly. One factual error, and what caused it.
Published 2 September 2026
Yahoo! JAPAN runs organic search on Google's engine, by its operator's own statement. We checked the same query on both the same morning: six of eight domains matched, top three identical. Where Yahoo! genuinely differs, and the share by device.
Published 2 September 2026
Ten checks any team can run on its Japanese pages without reading Japanese, the four states we give each finding, and the exact point where a checklist stops being enough.
Published 2 September 2026
JPRS rules: .co.jp needs a company registered in Japan (a registered foreign-company branch also qualifies); plain .jp needs a Japanese postal address. What Google says a ccTLD does, and the decision that fits most foreign companies.
Published 2 September 2026
Whether to write ja or ja-JP, what Google requires from the set (ISO codes, return links, absolute URLs), the three mistakes that silently disable it, and how our own site does it.
Published 2 September 2026
Font fallback, line breaks, line height, bold and italic, fixed-width boxes. W3C's line-start prohibition rules, the six CSS properties we set on Japanese text, and the three design decisions CSS cannot make.
Published 2 September 2026
No VPN needed for organic results. The settings for Google Japan and Yahoo! JAPAN, the location trap in Keyword Planner, the country filter in Search Console, and what looking from abroad cannot tell you.
Published 2 September 2026
Published prices for Japan's largest press-release service, Google's spam-policy wording on paid links, and the three sources of Japanese links that hold up: partners, trade media, and data people cite.
Published 2 September 2026
Translating your English keyword list produces Japanese text, not Japanese demand. Four assumptions that stop being true in Japanese, with our own measurements: the same keyword returning 40 or 260 depending on the location setting, four of fourteen terms returning no figure at all, and eleven written forms merged into five rows.
Published 12 August 2026
Five different products are sold under one name. Which one you need, what moves the price, and our three published levels.
Published 11 August 2026
You had the site translated and nothing happened. Three questions that decide which one your situation needs, the five things translation reliably leaves behind in Japanese, and a weighted checklist you can score your own pages against before you brief anyone.
Published 6 August 2026. Updated 2 September 2026
Internet advertising crossed half of Japan's total ad spend in 2025, for the first time. What the official numbers say, which channels do what (search, paid, LINE, social), what advertising costs (no platform minimum, and what a click costs for ten Japanese B2B queries), and a first-90-days sequence ordered so the cheapest learning comes first.
Published 6 August 2026. Updated 26 August 2026
Google's reported share in Japan runs from about 60% to over 80%, depending on the source. Split the data by device and the contradiction resolves: twelve months of desktop and mobile figures, what Yahoo! JAPAN actually is, and what to do about it.
These articles exist to support decisions, not to fill a blog. If your question is closer to "what should we do about our own site," the faster route is a free fit and scope review, or the fixed-scope US$250 Snapshot. The commercial pages are here: Japan SEO services and Japanese website localization.