This is the fact that changes the plan. Yahoo! Japan is a large share of Japanese search and it is served by Google’s index, so you do not run a separate Japanese SEO programme. One set of indexable Japanese pages reaches both engines at once — unlike Korea or China, where the leading engine has its own index.
The same paragraph is usually shorter in Japanese than in English, and headings often much shorter. Buttons and navigation that were tuned to English word lengths will look loose rather than broken, but it is worth a pass through your own components after switching the language on.
Nothing to configure, but it changes how a line wraps and where a heading breaks. If your design relies on manual line breaks placed for English, those breaks land in the wrong place in Japanese and are worth removing.
A product name can stay in Latin script or be written in katakana, and the right answer depends on your brand rather than on grammar. Pin the form you want in the glossary and it is used consistently everywhere, instead of being decided fresh on each page.
Japanese business copy carries a level of formality that a machine will not choose for you with certainty. Read your key pages, and where the tone is not the tone you want, correct that string once in the dashboard — your version is what visitors see from then on.
Add one line of code to your site, or point your domain at Proxylang, and add Japanese as a target language. Every page is translated, including meta titles, meta descriptions, alt text and form labels, and each one is served at its own Japanese URL. Setup takes about a minute and there is nothing to install in your content management system.
Selling into more than one Asian market? China works differently and needs its own decisions — see Chinese website translation .