Three scripts, many ways to write one keyword
The same word can be written in kanji, hiragana or katakana, and searchers do not always pick the same form. 猫, ねこ and ネコ all mean "cat". Loanwords are written in katakana, such as コンテンツ (content) or ダイエット (diet), and some people type the English word instead. Google connects many of these variants, but not all, and the results can differ.
For each target keyword, check which spelling the top-ranking pages use and use that form in your title and headings, mentioning common variants naturally in the text.
Keyword research in Japanese
- Japanese queries are often a noun plus a purpose word separated by a space: "SEO 対策", "ホームページ 作成 費用" (website creation cost), "東京 カフェ おすすめ" (Tokyo cafe recommended).
- Words such as おすすめ (recommended), 比較 (comparison), 方法 (method), 費用 (cost) and とは ("what is") signal intent, much like "best", "vs", "how to" and "what is" in English.
- There are no spaces in body text, so tools that count words by spaces do not work. Measure length in characters.
Style and trust
- Pick one politeness level and keep it: most business blogs use the polite desu/masu form. Mixing it with the plain form within an article reads as careless.
- Japanese readers look for clear company information. A 会社概要 (company overview) page with your company name, address and representative is a standard trust signal.
- Cite Japanese sources for Japanese facts, such as ministry pages or industry associations, rather than translating US statistics.
Titles, descriptions and URLs
- Full-width characters are wider than Latin letters, so a Japanese title fits in roughly half the characters of an English one. Keep the main keyword near the start.
- Japanese characters in URLs are percent-encoded and become very long when shared; English or romaji slugs are a common choice.
- Use hreflang="ja" (or ja-JP) if the site also has other language versions.