✦The assumption
Asia rollouts often get planned as one workstream. Same region, same rough GDP per head, same high smartphone penetration, so one agency, one budget line, one set of expectations.
For search, that assumption falls apart immediately, and Korea and Japan are the clearest example.
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✦Ten years apart
I recorded a conversation with Jiwon Kim, who spent roughly ten years doing SEO in Japan before moving into an in house role in Korea. Her description of the gap stuck with me.
A decade ago, when SEO was still an unfamiliar term to most Korean marketers, Japanese companies already had dedicated in house SEO teams. Not consultants on retainer. Staff.
The reason she gave is structural rather than cultural. Japan's search market was already heavily Google based at that point, somewhere around seventy to eighty percent by her recollection. When Google is where everyone searches, there is no alternative to optimizing your own website, because there is no portal ecosystem to publish into instead.
Korea had that alternative. With Naver's blog, cafe, and knowledge services absorbing so much attention, a Korean company could get visibility without ever thinking hard about its own site. So for years, many of them did not.
✦You can see it in the websites
The difference shows up in how sites are built.
Neither is wrong as design. They are answers to different environments.
Working out how to sequence Asia?
Tell me which markets are on the list. I will tell you what I can help with and what I would hand to someone else.
Send me a note✦What this means for your rollout
Do not reuse the Japan plan in Korea
A Japanese strategy assumes Google is the venue and that your competitors have already done the fundamentals. In Korea neither assumption holds.
Do not reuse the Korea plan in Japan
The reverse fails too. A plan built around getting registered with Naver and fixing image based pages does not describe a Japanese competitive set at all.
Budget them separately
Different content, different technical work, different timelines. Treating them as one line item guarantees one of them gets starved.
Hire per market
I work on Korea. For Japan I would rather introduce you to someone who works there. Anyone claiming deep expertise in every Asian market at once is worth a second look.
✦The upside for Korea
There is a genuinely good piece of news buried in this comparison.
In a mature market like Japan, everyone has done the basics, so competitive gains come from careful, incremental, expensive work. In Korea, plenty of sites still have not done the basics. Jiwon put it as Korea being at the point of moving from early adoption into growth, where doing the fundamentals properly still gets you a long way.
That will not stay true forever. Right now, though, a foreign brand willing to do ordinary, correct search work in Korea is competing against a field where many players have not.
If you want the specifics of what those fundamentals look like here, the Naver guide covers them.
Sources and notes
- All observations about Japan and Korea in this piece come from a conversation with Jiwon Kim, recorded for episode 12 of my podcast in August 2026. She worked in SEO consulting and in house marketing in Japan for about ten years and now works in house in Korea.
- The seventy to eighty percent figure for Google usage in Japan a decade ago is her recollection, not a cited statistic. Treat it as a practitioner's description of the environment rather than a measurement.
The Korean language version of this conversation, with a full transcript, is on the Korean side of this site.
✦Common questions
Yes, substantially. Japan is a Google dominated market where in house SEO teams have been normal for years, so competition is mature and gains come from detail. Korea has a second major search engine in Naver and a large share of sites that have not done the fundamentals.
Some can, but be skeptical of a single person claiming deep expertise in both. The technical work, the content, the competitive sets, and the timelines are all different. I work on Korea and prefer to introduce clients to specialists for other markets.
That is a business question more than a search question, and it depends on where your product fits. From a search perspective specifically, Korea currently has more low hanging fruit because fewer competitors have done the basics well.
I help companies grow in search, mostly on Google, in Korea and across borders. Eight years in the field taught me to look at content and structure together rather than chasing one technical fix.
