01 · A scoping reply
Initial fit and scope review
Free
Whether we can help, what we would do first, an outline of scope and deliverables, a timeline and a quote.
Japan SEO · Content · AI Search
SEO in Japan for overseas B2B companies
Japanese search is a separate market with its own language, its own competitors and its own evidence expectations. Translating your existing pages rarely produces the rankings, or the inquiries, you would expect at home.
- Written-first
- No introductory call required
- Fixed-price entry point
- Based in Japan
A Japanese specialist, not a translated keyword list
SuzuLabo is a Japanese company in Sapporo. We plan and run Japanese SEO for overseas B2B, SaaS, IT and professional-service companies entering Japan, and we can carry the work through to Japanese pages, content, conversion paths and AI search visibility rather than stopping at a recommendation deck.
Most of our work runs in writing. An introductory call is not required at any stage, and online meetings or additional language support can be arranged when a project needs them.
Three ways to start
You should be able to tell whether we are useful before you commit a budget.
02 · A fixed-scope review
Japan Website & SEO Snapshot
US$250 total
Japanese keyword hypotheses, examples from live Japanese search results and selected AI answers, a light technical and AI-crawler access check, localization and conversion findings, about 15 prioritized actions and a 30-day roadmap. Five business days, written delivery.
03 · The work itself
Implementation and ongoing support
Quoted to scope
Priced per engagement from the pages, work, deliverables, revision rounds and timeline involved. You receive the scope and price in writing before any work starts.
What the free review does and does not include
The free review is how we decide whether to take the work and how we price it. It is based on your inquiry and your public pages, and it usually takes us under an hour.
Included: a look at your public site and the Japan question you are asking, our view on fit, up to three clarifying questions, the approach we would recommend first, an outline of scope, deliverables and timeline, and a written quote.
Not included: keyword research with search volumes, analysis of Japanese search results or competitors, AI search testing, a crawl or technical audit, a prioritized fix list, a 30-day roadmap, or any implementation specification. That work is what the Snapshot and paid engagements are for.
If your question cannot be answered accurately without that research, we will say so and propose the Snapshot or a paid discovery step instead of guessing.
What actually changes when you search in Japanese
One technical baseline, two front doors
Yahoo! JAPAN is regularly raised as a reason to run a second, separate optimization programme in Japan. In practice the relationship is narrower than that. LY Corporation, which operates Yahoo! JAPAN, states that it "uses the search engine and search-linked ad transmission system of Google LLC (location: California, USA) for Yahoo! JAPAN's search service" (LY Corporation, confirmed 5 August 2026).
So the organic groundwork is largely shared. What is not shared is the interface, the surrounding content modules, the advertising products and the audience mix. That distinction matters for how you plan paid search and how you interpret what a Japanese buyer actually sees, and it is one of the things we check for a specific query set rather than assert in general.
Based on LY Corporation's own statement, confirmed 5 August 2026. What is shared and what differs is our reading of the practical consequence, not a claim by LY Corporation.
We do not tell clients that Yahoo! JAPAN is simply Google, and we do not sell a separate "Yahoo! JAPAN optimization" package.
The query is not a translation of your query
Japanese is written with kanji, hiragana, katakana and Latin characters, often for the same concept, and buyers mix them. A single English term can correspond to several Japanese queries with different volumes, different search results and different intent. Some of your global keywords have no meaningful Japanese equivalent; some Japanese queries have no English original at all.
Illustrative example. Which of these variants actually carries demand for your category has to be measured, not assumed — that is what the keyword work is for.
This is why a translated keyword list is a weak starting point. We research the terms Japanese buyers actually use, check what currently ranks for them, and map them to pages before anyone writes copy.
What the ranking pages already give the buyer
Japanese search results for commercial B2B queries are frequently held by long, specific, well-sourced pages, comparison articles and vendor directories. Ranking there usually means matching the level of detail already on the page, not publishing a shorter version of it.
What that detail consists of varies by industry, deal size and whether the buyer is B2B or B2C. We look at your actual search results before making that call rather than applying a general theory about "the Japanese market."
Company information carries weight
Japanese B2B sites tend to publish company details, delivery terms and contact expectations more explicitly than their overseas counterparts, and a page that omits them can read as incomplete to a buyer comparing vendors. Where that matters for your inquiries, it is usually a small fix with a real effect on conversion.
What we do
Japanese keyword and intent research
Keyword sets built in Japanese rather than translated. Character variants, synonyms and the actual search results for each priority term. Mapping to pages, so two of your pages do not compete for the same query.
Technical and international SEO
Indexation, crawl access, canonical signals, sitemaps, and the language and region setup for a bilingual site. For alternate versions Google supports HTML link tags, HTTP headers or a sitemap, and states that using more than one at the same time gives no additional benefit in Search (Google Search Central, confirmed 5 August 2026). We pick one method and make it consistent, including the self-referencing and reciprocal annotations Google requires.
Japanese content
Article and page production in Japanese, written for the search intent rather than translated from an English original. Outlines and drafts are reviewed against the sources they cite, and we mark clearly what is an official figure, what is a third-party estimate and what is our own observation.
On-page and conversion
Titles, headings, internal links, comparison tables and the evidence a Japanese buyer looks for before contacting you. Inquiry forms, form labels, confirmation steps and reply expectations, which are frequently the largest single loss point on a localized site.
Measurement
Search Console by query, page, country and device; the internal path from article to service page to form; and, where available, AI search reporting. We separate what we changed, what else changed and what can honestly be attributed.
What we do not do
Legal, tax, regulatory or company-formation advice; import, customs or logistics; recruitment. For those, JETRO's Investing in Japan service is the appropriate public starting point, and we will say so rather than improvise.
We also do not sell ranking, traffic or revenue guarantees. Anyone who does is describing something they cannot control.
AI search visibility, treated as part of SEO
Buyers increasingly meet a summary before they meet a website: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity. That changes what a page has to contain to be usable as a source. It does not create a separate discipline with its own secret markup.
Google's own guidance is explicit: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary," and "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" (Google Search Central, confirmed 5 August 2026).
What we check and fix:
Access. Whether the crawlers behind AI search features can actually reach your priority pages. These are controlled separately from each other: OpenAI states that OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search features while GPTBot is used for foundation-model training, and that "each setting is independent of the others" (OpenAI, confirmed 5 August 2026). Blocking one is a legitimate business decision. Blocking the wrong one by accident is not.
Consistency. Whether your company name, legal entity, location, services, pricing and contact details say the same thing across your site, your Japanese pages and the third-party sources that describe you. Inconsistent facts are one of the most common reasons an AI answer describes a company incorrectly.
Substance. Whether your pages contain the specifics an answer can be built from: what you do, for whom, in which market, at what price, with what evidence and what limits.
Measurement. Google's Generative AI performance report in Search Console shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date, is being rolled out to a subset of site owners, and is included in the Web search type of the standard performance report (Google, confirmed 5 August 2026). Bing Webmaster Tools reports citation activity separately. Where a report is not visible for your property, we record that as "not available," not as zero.
On terminology. This work is also called GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO or LLM optimization. We use AI search optimization, or AI search visibility, because it describes what is being optimized and because it keeps the work connected to the search fundamentals it depends on.
What we do not promise. We cannot guarantee that a specific AI system will mention, cite or recommend you, and neither can anyone else. Answers vary between systems, between phrasings of the same question and between runs. We measure under recorded conditions, report what we see including non-mentions, and re-measure the same way after changes.
Who this fits
Useful before launch, and after a Japanese site stops growing.
A good fit
- Overseas B2B, SaaS, IT or professional-service companies entering Japan, or already in Japan without organic traction
- Teams who need the Japanese work done, not only advised
- Teams who can work in writing across time zones
Better served elsewhere, or scoped separately
- E-commerce where logistics, customs and returns decide the outcome
- Medical, financial, crypto and similarly regulated offers where advertising and disclosure review dominate the work
- Engagements that require a permanent on-site presence or a daily meeting cadence
- Commission-only, unpaid-test or payment-after-delivery arrangements
If you have a physical location in Japan — an office, a store, a clinic, a school — local search and Google Business Profile become relevant, and we can include that in scope. For most software and service companies selling into Japan without a location, it is not the priority, and we will tell you so rather than sell it.
Evidence
A small amount of verifiable work, rather than a wall of logos.
Paid SEO content assignment
Canva Japan official blog
Keyword research, the article outline, a Japanese first draft and supporting image creation. The article was published after Canva's editorial review. A third-party SEO tool estimates that the published URL peaked above 1,000 monthly organic visits in April 2026.
Third-party tool estimate, not Canva's own analytics. We do not claim our work alone caused it.
Japan-market SEO
Japanese B2B training provider
A programme of roughly 20 Japanese articles. As of July 2026, third-party SEO tool estimates showed the lead article ranking first for its main target topic, drawing an estimated 319 monthly visits, and appearing for 28 search queries.
A Japanese client in the Japanese market, not an overseas company entering Japan. Shown as evidence that we can execute Japanese SEO.
Our own measurement
Tested on ourselves first
We run the same AI search visibility measurement on our own brand before selling it, with recorded prompts, conditions and full answers — and we count the answers that do not mention us.
Method and baseline are published on our case studies page.
How the work runs
Documented decisions, so time zones cost you nothing.
- 1
You send context
Your site, where you are with Japan, and the question you actually need answered.
- 2
We reply with fit, approach and a quote
Free, normally within one business day.
- 3
You choose a starting point
The US$250 Snapshot, or a scoped engagement if the direction is already clear.
- 4
We work in writing
Documented decisions, shared deliverables and named review points.
- 5
We measure and re-measure
Under conditions we can repeat, reporting what did not move as well as what did.
FAQ
Before you send an inquiry
Do we need a call to get started?
No. The fit review, the quote and the US$250 Snapshot all run in writing. Online meetings and additional language support can be arranged for larger projects when they help.
Do we have to buy the Snapshot before you will quote implementation?
No. If you already know what you need built, describe it and we will quote it. The Snapshot exists for the case where the priority is not yet clear, or where a decision needs evidence from live Japanese search results first.
What does implementation cost?
It is quoted per engagement, because the range is genuinely wide: a single Japanese landing page and a multi-page bilingual site with an ongoing content programme are not comparable. We quote scope, deliverables, revision rounds and timeline in writing before any work starts, and we do not begin work before the quote is accepted.
Do you need a separate program for Yahoo! JAPAN?
Usually not for organic search. LY Corporation states that Yahoo! JAPAN's search service uses Google's search engine and search-linked ad delivery system, so the organic foundations are largely shared. Interface, surrounding modules, ad products and audience differ, which matters most for paid search and for interpreting what a buyer sees.
Can you guarantee rankings or leads?
No. We can tell you what we will do, what we will measure and how we will report it. Rankings, traffic and inquiries depend on competitors, the search platforms and your own offer.
Can you help with visibility in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?
Yes, as part of SEO rather than as a separate product. We check crawler access, factual consistency and content substance, measure under recorded conditions, and re-measure after changes. We cannot guarantee a mention or a citation.
Can you write the Japanese content, or only advise?
We write it. Japanese keyword research, outlines, drafts and revisions are our core work, and content in Japanese is written for Japanese search intent rather than translated from an English original.
We need a Japanese website first. Is that in scope?
Yes — see Japanese website localization. SEO and the site build are usually planned together, because the page structure decided during a build determines what can rank later.
Who does the work?
SuzuLabo is a Japanese company based in Sapporo, Hokkaido. Work is delivered by a Japanese specialist rather than routed to a translation vendor, and we coordinate additional Japanese production or specialist input when a project needs it.
Start with a written review
Send your site and the Japan question you need answered. We will tell you whether we can help, what we would do first, and what it would cost. That reply is free.
Prefer email? kamada@suzulabo.co.jp