Ahrefs Pte. Ltd., a provider of SEO tools and marketing intelligence platforms, is pleased to announce that it plans to further accelerate its business expansion in the Japanese market. In 2024, the Ahrefs Japan team was newly established, and the company will further strengthen its expansion based on its local structure.
The company also focuses on disseminating information in Japanese and collaborating with user communities, with the aim of strengthening its support system for Japanese marketers.
CMO Tim Soulo visits Japan and has direct contact with Japanese users
Ahrefs has established a full-fledged local system in Japan, its third major market after the US and the UK, and is supporting a wide range of users from enterprise companies to individual marketers. This time, the company’s CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Tim Soulo visited Japan. He spoke at a meetup for Japanese users held in Tokyo together with Takanori Kawaharada, head of marketing in Japan.
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“Japan is a market with high technological literacy and a very mature market for website operation and digital marketing. We would like to leverage Ahrefs’ strength of being ‘powered by big data’ (a platform backed by massive amounts of big data) to provide deeper insights to Japanese marketers.”
Strengthening support through local systems and speedy product improvements
Ahrefs provides highly accurate features such as backlink analysis, keyword research, and competitive research based on its own web crawlers and data centers. In recent years, it has continued to evolve into a marketing intelligence platform that goes beyond SEO analysis .
Starting in 2024, Takanori Kawarada, who has extensive experience in localizing overseas SaaS services and services for the Japanese market, will be appointed as the head of marketing in Japan, accelerating the development of Japanese UI, blogs, support content, etc. In addition, by collecting feedback and managing communities using X (formerly Twitter), the company is quickly reflecting user feedback in product improvements.
“We’ve thoroughly localized our products, including our tools in Japanese, blogs, help articles, and AI content support features. In the Japanese market, where English is a barrier, a user experience that can be completed entirely in Japanese is essential. What’s attractive about Ahrefs as a company is their culture of listening to feedback from the field and their speed. I was surprised at how quickly they could implement a feature within the next week if we contacted them with a request.”
Supporting “brand discoverability” in the age of generative AI
“Instead of imitating other companies, we create features that only Ahrefs can provide. That’s our strength.”
Going forward, the company plans to increase contact with the Japanese community by expanding awareness among enterprise users and holding offline events, etc. While it plans to strengthen its business support functions using generative AI, it is cautious about automatically generated content and places emphasis on using AI as a tool to enhance users’ own communication skills.
CMO Tim also commented on the direction of the tool, saying, “Neither I nor my team recommend mass-generated AI content with one click. Ahrefs is a platform to provide truly usable, high-quality information to users looking for ideas to use in their marketing.”
Ahrefs is evolving beyond being just an SEO tool. In this day and age when there is an uncountable amount of data on the web, we will continue to focus on our activities in the Japanese market as a marketing intelligence partner to help companies and brands maximize their online presence.
SOURCE: PRTimes
