Did I tell you how much I loved Japanese goods? A few months back when I made a pit stop at Narita, I ended up buying a couple of goodies like this Yomiuri Giants ballcap, fridge magnets and Tatami slippers. There is just something about products that come out of Japan that brings me back to when I was 7 and let me tell you why. Tatami slippers feels awesome on your feet at the end of a long day by the way 🙂
You see my father earned a technical scholarship at AOTS (Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship) early in his career and he spent a few years training and eventually working there.
Kamui #9 of the Yomiuri Giants
During his time in the Empire he would buy my older brother really cool toys, which made my eyes glaze over, and I remember getting upset because I had limited air time with his toys. All I got at that age was a t-shirt or Mars chocolate bars when he came back home. Do not get me wrong here, as a young boy I still appreciated whatever I got especially growing up in a very strict and middle class household. It translates up to now as Japanese chocolate bars are the first things I normally buy from Nijiya or Mitsuwa, the topic of this articles’ website review.
A quick reminder once more, this review is not about the actual service at Mitsuwa. This review is based on their website and the various pros and cons that I find as I browse around its different sections. The customer service at the San Jose store again is quality, extremely friendly and the deli and food products are of good grade.
Now the website is quite interesting. Doing a basic incognito search on Google, with all cookies deleted and current location service masked, the Mistuwa (mitsuwa.com) website shows on top of SERP. I click on it and this is where it brought me:
Mitsuwa… in Japanese!
I immediately got confused because immediately after landing here, Google landed me on the Japanese version of the site. Now normally I would not mind but compared to Nijiya’s English/Japanese mix, Mitsuwa’s was much more immersive, with a lot of Kanji and not a lot of English words or Romanji.
I also had to do a double take just to make sure I am not on Google JP as I tend to do analysis and testing across different Google search versions and sometimes I forget to reset it back to the US version.
However no big deal right? On the upper right section of the website is a link that says “English >” so I went ahead and clicked on it…
…only to be brought back to the Japanese version! I clicked on it once more, on different browsers and different search engines such as Bing and Yahoo and all results drop me back to where I started.
Hard to write a website review in a language that I do not understand right? Do not fret dear explorer, Chrome has a decent translation service which I inevitably used just so that I can navigate and understand where Mitsuwa is headquarted. Clicking on Translate brought me a not so perfect English-worded version of the site but it is better nothing and I just really needed to get to their About page to get to the bottom of their corporate identity. Once I got there, it looked like this:
Hold on wait… all that Kanji and they’re based in Torrance?
Hmmm… so… Mitsuwa is another US company based in Torrance, CA with no stores in Japan or anywhere else in Asia.
At this point, I have to give them low points for user experience. Either the English version of the website is not working for some reason, which they still need to fix as Google tries to serve the best experience based on the probable location of the user. Or they are forcing their user to go to their Japanese version, regardless of where they come from. I think the first scenario is more likely as it does not make any sense to force the Kanji experience on their English-reading customers. The thing is though, as I pointed this out on my Nijiya Market website review, there is very little potential ROI with regards to delivering a default experience that your main United States market or audience will not appreciate. Most of my views regarding this can be read in my BuzzStarter Website Review – Nijiya Japanese Markets article so I am not going to rehash it but let’s just say that less than 1% of the the US market read Kanji, so I would not default a Kanji experience unless my company is based in Japan.
Since I am slightly hinting once more on product and branding, I have to tell you something. I have been shopping at Mitsuwa for almost 3 years now and I never knew they had a mascot until I started reviewing the website, of which I only went to when I decided to review it. Say hello to Mi-tan!
Mi-tan, the Mitsuwa Mascot is definitely a cute and cuddly something…
It definitely is an ambiguous type of animal, maybe an usagi (rabbit), a guinea pig (morumotto), or a white mouse (shiroi mausu). Whatever it is, it is cute right? This critter is all over the website too which brings me to my point…
How come I never see this guy at the San Jose store? I will definitely try to drop by shortly after I write this to double-check but I am fairly sure that Mi-Tan is not heavily merchandised at all because if she (or he) was, I would have seen plushies of this guy all over the place. Having mascots are an easy way of emotionally connecting the brand to your audience however in this case, the Mitsuwa mascot is not surfaced as much in the store that I go to when compared to the website. It definitely is a huge room for improvement Mitsuwa, Mi-Tan keychains anyone?
Have you guys also noticed all these certificates at the bottom of most retail websites? Most of these security certificates are for the users security, especially when it comes to their identity and credit card information for online transactions. For Mitsuwa, they have this badge at their footer:
PCI Compliant… really?
Again, the goal of this is to assure visitors to their site about certain security guarantees. In this case, Mitsuwa is guaranteeing PCI Compliance, that they are following a set of requirements designed to ensure that they are delivering and maintaining a secure environment whenever you store or transmit credit card information on their site.
Sounds good so far right? Well let us click on the badge to see what the real skinny is on their PCI Compliance…
Uh oh… Someone needs to update this…
As you can see, it looks like the certificate has not been updated in awhile. By the way, looking at this message does not mean Mitsuwa is not PCI Compliant but on the other hand, it does not make anybody feel good online shopping here once they see this message. Time to fix this guys!
How about the actual shopping experience then? It was challenging at first because since I am being defaulted to the Japanese version, clicking on the “Net Shopping” link sends me directly to the Japanese version of the online store. Now I do not know if this is by default but I will give them the benefit of the doubt that it is not. Luckily there is an English version of the online store and off I went.
Immediately I found a number of tactical SEO items that can improve the site such as:
- Category structure. The online store has almost the same categories as any other shopping site but it’s at the same level URI wise as product pages. For example the Bread and Jam’s category URL:
- https://store.mitsuwa.com/bread–jam-c19.aspx
is at the same level as a product under the category: - https://store.mitsuwa.com/boloniya-butter-bread-p1435.aspx
This is important because if search engines where to define your keyword to category structure, it would be harder for these bots to differentiate between parent and child pages, where your categories are parent pages and products are children, and attach the right taxonomy to these groups.
- https://store.mitsuwa.com/bread–jam-c19.aspx
- Lack of direction in keyword research.
- Friendly URLs need to be revisited for relevance.
- Much more…
The wrap up. I give the site a score of 2.5 out of 5 buzz points. It is the lowest score I have given thus far ever since I started reviewing websites. The pros:
- Great selection of Japanese goods that are available online.
- A fairly fast loading site.
- Mobile responsive.
The cons:
- They need to fix the English version of the site. For US based retail store there seems to be a lack of urgency in fixing this, especially when almost 99% your consumers can’t read Kanji.
- Fix all security certificates on the site.
- Lacking in tactical SEO best practices on the online store.
Mitsuwa, if you need help please reach out and I will be more than happy to give you the proper guidance you need to resolve these and the other issues I found that are too many to mention.
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On our previous website review, I just revealed to you my love of shopping. This transcends all sorts of different products, from clothes to accessories, including food. Another set of products I crave are everything Japanese, from candies to snacks, deli-style sushi, fresh cuts of fish and kobe style beef. Just to give you an idea of what I look like when I buy those Japanese Oreos:
As happy as Doraemon eating a cookie!
Yeah, well I do not exactly look like our buddy Doraemon here but, that’s how my inner lion feels like when I’m munching on a 9-piece sashimi/sushi bento box for lunch… and sometimes dinner 🙂 By the way, they have great deals on these bentos, I suggest you check out out yourself as Nijiya Market is almost in every major city in both south and north California.
On the other hand, you know that this is a website review so, you are probably thinking how their website was configured or performs right? Well let me get down to this then.
Let me make this clear, going to the actual Nijiya Market is a great experience. I normally go the the San Jose and San Francisco stores and I have never had any rude clerks or attendants, they deliver products at great prices especially their deli and sushi bentos. What I am reviewing here is the site and not the brick and mortar experience, I shop here regularly.
So when I loaded up the Nijiya Market website (nijiya.com) on Firefox, the site appeared to hang for a few. After 2 seconds when it did actually load up, I tried on other browsers such as IE, Chrome and Safari and I got the same result so I did a little bit of debugging. Guess what I found out?
This page has 18 external Javascript scripts.
This page has 9 external stylesheets.
This page has 7 external background images.
There are 12 JavaScript scripts found in the head of the document.
There are 51 components with misconfigured ETags.
Now there’s a couple more items that are causing the site to have load time issues but these are the main culprits. Now Nijiya, if you do not know how to fix this, give me a call and give you the right guidance to resolve this.
You maybe wondering, why would load times matter? Well search engines, especially Google, look for usability and this is important as the algorithm values fast load times as a good sign of user experience. There are also a couple of other important domain and page factors that Google adds to this but this has been known to have a direct correlation to page indexing.
As a retail site as well, slow loading sites are known to convert less than fast loading ones and this is fact. It is also common sense, would someone like to shop at a website that has slow loading pages? Take a look at this Kissmetrics infographic:
Kissmetrics Website Shopping Behavior Infographic.
Looking at the first graph should send the CTO and the lead product manager of Nijiya’s website back to the drawing board as that is exactly what I experienced when I was trying out the Nijiya website on four different web browsers, getting the same result. Can you imagine how many visitors they are actually losing because of these load performance issues?
As far as trying to improve the brand loyalty, it is also important to note with the above data that having a fast loading site is important in achieving that. This is more true if the business is extending that brand and that retail experience to a medium that is available 24/7. Nijiya, you need to fix this and again I extend my help!
So far I have discussed some technical issues that affects not just the experience but SEO. Since we are on the topic of brand, I want to bring out something about the site. When you visit it one thing is glaringly clear, you notice that there are Japanese translations for every English copy on the every page:
The Nijiya Market Home Page.
When I first saw this, I thought to myself I landed on a company based in Japan. I got this impression because I do visit a number of Japanese-based retail stores and the Nijiya website gave me that experience. However, I did a little bit of digging and visited their About Us page and it turns out that the company is an American based one that started in San Diego. With its success, it has been expanding mostly in US western markets with an impressive opening in New York.
That in mind, I wondered why the effort? Are they doing this because they want to present an authentic Japanese brand? It definitely can’t be for the the Japanese American market. Studies has shown that American Nisei learned Japanese (read and write) from their Isei parents, went to Japanese school, lived in a Japanese community or in the internment camps. They speak it to an extent but reading is extremely limited by this generation. From Sansei to Gosei, the first language is English and based on a 2011 columnist in The Rafu Shimpoof Los Angeles, “Younger Japanese Americans are more culturally American than Japanese” and “other than some vestigial cultural affiliations, a Yonsei or Gosei is simply another American.”
(Sidenote here. Not a lot of people know this about American history but during World War II, Japanese Isei, Nisei and their Sansei children were interred in camps because of Executive Order 9066. In 1988, then President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act which issued a formal legislative apology and compensation for more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who were negatively impacted by the internment.)
Is it for the visiting/transient Japanese? I did a little digging on that as well and it turns out based on the the Japan National Tourist Organization, there were 45,488 Japanese tourists to the US in 2013, and there were 52,016 for 2014. That’s an impressive 14.4% year over year increase but not enough to push revenue. To make this even work, Japanese tourists would have to be aware of Nijiya as a brand for them to even be aware they exist. The last time I flew in from Japan (I rode ANA) from Narita to SJC, nothing on the flight merchandised anything relating to Japanese stores in the area. Which I think is not a bad idea at all for Nijiya to consider in order to generate awareness.
I guess the owners are doing this to promote the Japanese language as well as elements of the culture on the website. I think that is definitely a noble effort, as I believe that in order to chart a course for the future, one must look at the past. However, presenting two language experiences in one, especially on a website can be polarizing, if anything it creates a confusing user experience. You may tend to alienate the non-Japanese American who has no knowledge of the brand, instead of converting they may instead bounce.
My suggestion? Create two versions of the site, one in English and one in Japanese. By doing this you:
- Will have the ability to present the right experience for the right audience.
- Will reduce confusion for your average English speaking shopper. They’re not going to think that the products are shipping from Japan which equals expensive.
Now there’s a lot more issues I found (such as dead links that are heavily promoted on the left nav) as I went around the site but the one major thing that Nijiya has to fix is that, they need to create a mobile responsive version of their website. Currently they don’t have any and I am dying to see their analytics numbers to see before and after mobilegeddon, on how much traffic was lost because of this.
So let’s wrap this up. I give this site 3 out of 5 buzz points. The pros:
- As a retail site, it merchandises a good selection of Japanese products online.
- Has a defined identity.
The cons:
- Slow loading site.
- Delivers a fairly confusing shopping experience.
- The need to improve on the brand.
- Does not have a mobile version/mobile responsive version of the site.
- Dead links.
- Much more…
There are some key points with this review that the business can simply take and resolve these on their own. However Nijiya, I offer my guidance, please reach out and I am more than happy to help and consult.
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I love shopping! Be it clothes, accessories or shoes, one of the things that give me a challenge is getting the best deal, discount, whatever that can give me more bang for my buck. With the rising cost in labor and logisitics that gets that product from the shelves to our doorstep comes increased prices and this motivates me, and other consumers out there to find a good bargain.
So it is no wonder I also look for good values when it comes to grocery shopping. By the way I love shopping for food because I like to pick what I get to sustain this body of mine and around my area I do have a lot of choices. One particular grocery I like is Zanotto’s, its this small family chain of groceries in San Jose, stands out to me because they carry good products I would never find anywhere else. Now, I do not get the chance to shop there quite often as I get off work a little later than their operating hours but when I do, I normally go to the deli and grab me an Original Sandwich! Also, their prices maybe a little more than your average grocery but the service is good and you never get the feeling that you are bothering clerks when you have a question to ask.
However just like any local business, even if it has grown, their website definitely needed an improvement… and fast. Towards the end of 2014 up until around March of 2015, this is what their site looked like:
Doing a deep dive at their interior pages told the same story. A lot of Adobe Flash going on, with not a lot of focus on what they were about but mostly where and how you can find them, lacking guidance on understanding what it really means to run a brand, a product and acquire customers through an online channel.
Come April 2015 though, a much needed re-design came around and now, the site looks like this:
Definitely a huge step in the right direction as the new site is mobile friendly, although there are some sizing issues on mobile which needs to be addressed an fixed. For example these two images and on the home page:
When you view this on mobile, this looks like this:
And then towards the footer where the addresses are wrapping extremely to the left, when viewed from mobile:
One can see that there definitely are a couple of things that still needs to be corrected and ironed out from this new re-design. The one thing that my screenshot does not show is the Contact Us form gets all broken when viewed on mobile as well.
What about their taxonomy? You know, their evergreen keywords? It is hard to make a comment about those because that really depends on what the current brand/marketing strategy is, something that I am not currently privileged to know. One thing is for sure though, just the basic on-page keyword optimization once more is lacking even on the new Zanotto’s site.
The site also runs on WordPress, which is the best CMS in my opinion, that is out there in the market. All BuzzStarter developed sites, from ClearScale.net to Plated’s The Dish runs on on this platform. Nonetheless, it is not configured to its’ full potential as I do not see any of the more important plugins that most in the industry use.
These are tactical elements that are fairly straightforward to fix. However how about the strategic elements? Especially on how I think they can improve their current efforts?
There are a couple of things I can make comments on, however I again hold back a bit as I am not privy to what they are currently planning on the marketing side.
On what I would review on is that I do see a number of call to actions on the site such as:
- View Weekly Ad
- Contact Us (which is horribly placed at the footer)
- Various deli forms and menus in PDF format
- Catering
- Follow them on either Facebook and Instagram
- etc.
Now there are these CTAs and possibly a few more and one huge thing that is missing is that I see no tracking on the site that can measure these various key performance indicators. Without that, it is impossible to even measure if this new site is performing as expected. It is also a missed opportunity in trying to understand what your current and possibly new consumers are interested in.
Gauging how they do their Social and their share of voice, I think that they can still do a lot more, tie in a couple of really good promotions and measure these conversions back to their website. The retail vertical is ideal to every graphic Social platform out there as the products they carry are very visual in nature. Food in itself has reached a revolution in the past 5 years with the various TV shows as well as do- it-yourself foodkits that has hit the market and these platforms are great in pushing your brand out there.
So the final verdict? I give this site a 3.5 out of 5 buzz points. The pros:
- Great effort on the site redesign.
- Good choice in moving the site into a content management system, especially using WordPress.
- Finally surfacing their Social media channels more when compared to the old site.
- A step in the right direction.
The cons:
- Still needs clarity and direction regarding the numerous call-to-actions on the site.
- Zero use of tracking behavior or the more defined conversion points .
- Missed opportunities, especially with regards to utilizing the site for community management and engagement.
- Could still improve on defining their brand and related products.
That said, for every review I do I will do my best to send this out to the business owners. What they do with this review, they can work and fix it themselves or I also offer my own services to resolve this any improve any other existing or new issues that I may find.
Do you have a website that you would like me to review? Do you have any particular questions about this review? Here are the ways you can follow, learn and get in touch with us:
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The last time here at BuzzStarter, we were discussing the importance of Local SEO. To recap:
- Consumers tend to search local now especially if the search intent is an intent to consume or buy.
- Consumers trust local retailers or brands much more than your big global brand.
- Mobile internet usage has skyrocketed in the past 5 years, especially with the penetration of the smartphone which delivers a mobile internet experience on the fly, making internet searches easily accessible anytime, anywhere.
- Avoiding keywords that deliver double stacked results towards your competitor.
- Have a broad understanding of search intent and make sure that you define your site and your content around what the nature of that is. If you run a site about funny t-shirts, make sure that search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo understand that you have merchandise and content about funny t-shirts.
- Understanding how Social Media sites can play an important role in getting your message across to your intended audience.
That concludes this series. Like this article so far? Did you find it useful? Here are the ways you can follow, learn and grow with us:
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- Schedule a call with us and get a straight answer. Be it digital analytics, search optimization or any online acquisition question, we will give you the insights you need to get to the next step.
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Why Local SEO Matters (continued…)
Focusing on a customer base that matters. I live close to a local neighborhood grocery store that has 3 locations that can be found here in the South Bay. If somebody were to visit their website, people who are internet savvy more so search marketing savvy, one would say that they are not leveraging their ability to capture a wider audience and possibly grow their business because their website is so draconian and simple. Now if one were to argue the merits of technical SEO, that maybe true because if you browse their site, it’s:
- lacking any sort of savvy keyword optimization as it’s fairly evident with the more visible signs such as lacking page descriptions and URL structures.
- missing any sort of analytics tracking to measure anything that the business may use pertaining to user engagement on their website.
- no investment in PPC ads or display as none show up when I do a search for their branded keywords or allow my browser to be cookied and visit local area newspaper websites to see if I may get a display unit pertaining to this business.
- lacking any meaningful tools that will improve social media engagement.
- and so on…
Having said and noticed these, I totally understand why there is such a lack of implementing some of the best practices I mentioned above. They do not have any online ordering. No online ordering means no local deliveries, domestic or otherwise which leads to no effort in capturing a wider online audience. It doesn’t do any content marketing and publish a number of articles such as gourmet recipes or 10 tips in picking asparagus (I think we can always use better tips in picking asparagus). It may probably have ambitions to expand further down the road but for now it is a family run business that focuses on basic core principles, providing the best possible products to the local community it serves. It also leverages that community to thrive and loves to engage their customers face to face, providing great customer service and giving tips such as which type of fish to pick to grill or fry.
The point here is that this business knows its local audience and will do just enough to capture simply that. So for now, their focus on point.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, other search engines & SEO
Knowing the importance of local SEO, it is critical more than ever to understand how local search intent is tied in to search engines and the various services/features they provide. In the case of Google, registering your business with their free Places services gives you the advantage of showing up on the upper right infobox when somebody searches for your brand locally, for example one of my clients, ClearScale:
Or when you search for Buzz Starter on Yahoo:
Another good example would be Google+ integration with Google search. We are heavy Moz users and big fans as well and doing a search for “moz” on Google shows you the recent post Moz made on their official Google+ channel:
Is the picture getting clearer now? By showing these examples is it clear why it is important to take into consideration optimizing locally for search? Allow me to give more details.
By utilizing these various services/platforms, the algorithm driving search is aided, making it easier to understand and refine search intent. The more possible users/customers engage these, the clearer the signal is that goes back to your brand, improving mind share. KPI’s such as average time on page, length of time onsite, average pages per visit rolls up to engagement, which is the most valuable measure to improve in today’s SEO. This in turn improves and refines search results, connecting the right results at the right time of where the search is coming from.
We are not done yet! Come back next week for the conclusion of this series. Need immediate help? Contact us and let us know how we can make you successful in your next content or inbound marketing campaign.
