Rakuten’s SEO is a notable example of how search engine optimization can transform a company’s digital presence. After all, one of Japan’s largest technology companies, with a portfolio spanning e-commerce, fintech, and digital services, has faced several challenges along the way.
This blog post details the history of Rakuten, the challenges they faced, and how SEO helped them overcome these obstacles, resulting in significant growth in traffic and user engagement.
The History of Rakuten
Rakuten was founded by Hiroshi Mikitani in 1997 in Tokyo as an online marketplace called Rakuten Ichiba. The name “Rakuten” means “optimism” in Japanese , reflecting Mikitani’s vision of creating an e-commerce space that would empower merchants by giving them greater control over their online stores. From its humble beginnings with just six employees and thirteen merchants, Rakuten has grown exponentially.
The company went public in 2000, and over the years, it forex data has expanded into a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, and digital content. Rakuten now employs more than 28,000 people worldwide and operates in over 30 countries, with revenue of $13.3 billion at the end of 2023 .
Additionally, Rakuten has made significant investments in global companies such as Viber, Kobo and the Golden State Warriors basketball team.
What were the problems and challenges faced by Rakuten?
Despite its success, Rakuten has faced several challenges over the years, especially when it comes to user engagement and organic traffic. With Rakuten Recipe, a platform launched in 2010 that allows users to share recipes, the company found that while it had a large number of recipes and a solid user base, visitors were spending less time on the site than they would have liked.
The lack of a robust and optimized data structure made it difficult to see recipes in Google searches, negatively impacting organic traffic. In addition, the complexity of managing and categorizing almost 1.9 million recipes made the challenge even greater, as Google itself points out .
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How SEO Helped Rakuten Overcome These Challenges
To address these issues, Rakuten adopted several SEO strategies, focusing primarily on structured data and user experience in Google searches.
In 2012, Rakuten Recipe began using structured data to improve the visibility of its recipes in search results. Two years later, they expanded the number of structured data categories to more accurately recommend recipes.
In 2017, Rakuten was able to further improve their structured data. They implemented these improvements in just two weeks, using Search Console to monitor and fix errors on their AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages. The structured data testing tool was essential for validating the code and eliminating errors, ensuring that the pages were optimized for enhanced search.
The changes resulted in a significant increase in structured data performance in Google Search. Organic traffic to Rakuten Recipe pages increased by 2.7x, and average session duration increased by 1.5x. These improvements allowed users to find more relevant recipes and spend more time on the site, resulting in a more satisfying experience.