Applications: candidates may apply from outside Japan. Visa sponsorship: available. Japanese: Not required. English: Fluent. Japan Dev tags: Engineering, Web / Full-stack, React, Typescript.
What You'll Do
Strategy & Attribution
- Set and iterate on a site-wide SEO strategy, define quantified goals and attribution frameworks for each initiative, prioritize by ROI, and run regular retrospectives.
- Use the GSC Search Analytics API / Bulk Data Export to load impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position into our own data warehouse, broken out by query, page, country, and device, and build a self-serve SEO dashboard rather than relying on screenshots from third-party tools.
- Design incrementality measurement frameworks using page-level bucket experiments, holdout groups, and causal time-series analysis to separate the gains a change actually drove from seasonality or algorithm updates.
Crawling & Indexing
- Manage crawl budget by combining GSC crawl stats with CDN / edge log analysis to break down Googlebot and Bingbot hit distribution, and quantify the share of wasted crawl (parameter pages, faceted navigation, deep pagination, redirect chains, 5xx errors).
- Work through indexing diagnostics by finding the root cause, not by resubmitting URLs one at a time, such as:
"Crawled - currently not indexed", "Discovered - currently not indexed", "Duplicate without user-selected canonical", and Soft 404
- Control index bloat for large-scale UGC (artwork pages, tag pages, user pages) through thin-content classification, weighing noindex, follow against robots.txt blocking, a canonical consolidation strategy, orphan-page cleanup, and click-depth control.
- Build and maintain sitemap architecture, including sharding and sitemap index files,
"lastmod" accuracy, image sitemaps, incremental submission, and IndexNow.
- Use robots directives (robots.txt / meta robots /
"X-Robots-Tag") and status-code semantics (301 vs. 308, 410 vs. 404, and how 5xx responses feed back into crawl rate) correctly.
Content & Site Structure
- Research keywords and classify search intent, analyze SERP features, and audit keyword cannibalization.
- Implement and monitor structured data, including
ImageObject, CreativeWork, ProfilePage, BreadcrumbList, ItemList, Organization / sameAs, with rich-result eligibility and impression volume as success criteria.
- Design internal linking architecture, covering anchor-text distribution, PageRank flow and dilution, hub-and-cluster structure, and topical authority building.
- Optimize Google Images and Discover traffic, including ensuring images served through the CDN are crawlable by Googlebot-Image, along with optimizing alt text / filenames and licensable images.
- Understand the specific risk that E-E-A-T and Google's spam policies (scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse) pose to a UGC + AIGC site, and design safeguards proactively.
Rendering & Performance
- Lead the evaluation and rollout of SSR / pre-rendering — judged by indexing and ranking gains, not by how many pages were converted to SSR.
- Rely on CrUX field data (LCP / CLS / INP thresholds and p75 distribution) for Core Web Vitals, distinguish origin-level from URL-group attribution, and understand how Googlebot's stateless behavior (no cookies, no localStorage execution) and CDN
Vary / Cache-Control headers affect crawlability and cache hit rate.
AI Search Optimization (GEO / AEO)
- Distinguish between and manage AI crawlers such as
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. Understand which bots are used for training versus retrieval, and know practical details such as Google-Extended not affecting AI Overviews.
- Understand the indexing dependencies behind each AI surface (e.g. AI Overviews depends on Google Search indexing, while ChatGPT Search relies heavily on Bing), and work backward from that to the right optimization moves.
- Maintain a set of tracked prompts, and monitor our brand / domain's share of voice in AI answers along with shifts in traffic share from AI surfaces.
- Design content for extractability through semantic chunking, direct-answer paragraphs, structured facts (tables / lists), stable URLs, and trustworthy timestamps.
Engineering & Collaboration
- Use AI-assisted coding to automate SEO monitoring, diagnostics, and reporting by building our own crawler, log pipeline, rank tracker, structured-data regression tests, and pre-launch SEO CI checks.
- Turn SEO requirements into plans that frontend, backend, content, and growth teams can act on directly, and make the case to leadership on impact and priority.
International SEO (Nice to Have)
- Handle multi-locale hreflang architecture correctly, including return-tag symmetry,
x-default, and its relationship with canonical, among other details.
- Research keywords by market, understanding the differences between Japanese (word segmentation, katakana / kanji variants, Yahoo! Japan running on Google's index) and Korean (the Naver Yeti crawler, an independent ecosystem).
What We're Looking For
- You have 2+ years of SEO experience, including at least 1 year on a site with millions of pages.
- You have strong React / TypeScript skills and are fluent in modern React (Hooks, SSR / RSC, concurrent features), with experience in scalable frontend architecture.
- You have hands-on production experience with SSR, and understand the trade-offs around hydration, streaming, and caching strategies.
- You have at least one Technical SEO case study with a quantifiable outcome, and can walk through the baseline, the intervention, the attribution method, and the result.
- You're proficient in log-file analysis — able to write your own scripts to process access logs on the order of tens of millions of rows, not just work through a SaaS tool.
- You're familiar with GSC (including its API), tools such as Ahrefs / Semrush, and web analytics platforms.
- You use AI tools extensively in your daily work, with AI coding and AI-assisted analysis already part of how you operate.
Nice to Have
- Hands-on GEO experience.
- Programmatic SEO experience, especially in fast-growing, large-scale UGC site contexts.
- Genuine enthusiasm for and understanding of AIGC and the ACG (anime, comics, and games) community.
- Full-stack backend experience, including Node, Postgres, and similar.