Japan’s WOVN.io helps websites improve search engine visibility in any language

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See the original story in Japanese.

WOVN.io instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment only by adding a single Javascript code to the website source. They started providing a premium edition in February, followed by participating in the pitch competition at Echelon in Singapore this July as the only team from Japan. We were told that the service has been adopted into more than 4,500 websites in the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Spain and other countries.

Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies, the Japanese startup behind WOVN.io, recently made two announcements: partnering with Recruit Communications, a marketing-focused subsidiary under Japan’s Recruit Holdings (TSE:6098), and launching SEO-enabled library WOVN++ in beta.

Based on a partnership with Recruit Communications, WOVN.io will be implemented into various media websites provided by Recruit Holdings group companies. Coinciding with leveraging the company’s in-house online dictionary, the solution will be used to translate 12 websites into several languages, starting with English, Chinese and Korean, in 2015 Q3.

In our previous articles covering WOVN.io, we have heard many voices from users concerned about how the solution will have an impact on SEO results. To address this issue, the company introduced a library called WOVN++ in Ruby and PHP, which creates a static HTML source code rather than dynamically generating a translated webpage so that translated pages are also scanned for search engine results.

Minimal Technologies CEO Takaharu Hayashi said that typical Japanese companies are less likely to forget SEO measures when establishing a media site or an e-commerce site which targets overseas markets.

Hayashi explained:

Even Google does not have much market share in China or Korea as well as in Japan; China is dominated by Baidu and Korea by Naver, where different SEO measures may be required respectively. WOVN++ can work well with these different local search engines, driving user traffic from many other countries. We will focus on optimizing our solution to more search engines in the Southeast Asian region.

One can use the WOVN++ library in beta regardless of which service plan subscribed to. Going forward, the company wants to support an additional feature allowing users to display their website in the upper level of search results.

WOVN.io earns 90% of its entire revenue stream from their enterprise plan users. Currently payable in Japanese yen, however, the company recently registered a branch office in California to enable accepting payments in US dollars; they can now improve the new feature to better serve users in Japan and the rest of the world.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by Masaru Ikeda and “Tex” Pomeroy