I recently registered a few good product names on May 1st in IDN.jp form. There was a close equivalent that starting showing up in Yahoo! Japan’s SERPs the same week. After seeing this one of the big competitors for this company immediately registered about 30 related domains to their products.
Right now in Japan it’s a time when product sellers are seeing the sites they created & are paying good money in PPC outranked in natural search by IDN sites. Even if the Japanese IDN comes in the top 5 to 10 spot it stands out like a sore thumb. The companies who aren’t familiar with IDNs immediately recognize them as new sites & they must be outranking them because of the keyword value.
Some may not desire to develop all that they buy but they are sure of one thing. My competitors won’t get these domains if I register the rest first. The smaller & more competitive companies will be able to buy up unregistered domains if they do it within this year (as free regs). Unfortunately the bigger companies will take more time & have to pay a higher price getting good domains in the aftermarket if they want them.
How to maximize the use of IDNs is still not 100% apparent to Japanese. I’m referring to the technical aspect, & even with marketing use. I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently from Japanese asking about potential, times, & how to use them effectively. These kinds of questions aren’t easy to answer without prior testing & data.
So one of the greatest inspiration for most business’s is simply copy what your competitor is doing even if you don’t understand it. I’m sure the guy who bought registered the 30 IDN dot jps would have dismissed the idea if told in April but seeing a competitor beat him for one of his main keywords was inspiration enough.
