How do you improve Rakuten search ranking?
Honestly: Rakuten does not publish its full ranking formula, so no one can promise a ranking. What a seller can do is make a product easy to find and easy to understand — the right genre, accurate tags, a clear title and description — and then measure what changes. This workflow is Rakuten Ichiba SEO in that practical sense: improving how well a product matches the searches and genre browsing of real shoppers inside Ichiba, one controlled change at a time.
Step 1 — Confirm the cause
Start from the evidence file in the diagnosis guide. Pick a small batch of products, ideally five to ten, where you have a dated symptom and a reason to suspect placement. Everything that follows applies to that batch only.
Step 2 — Choose the target genre
For each product, list two or three candidate genres. Use the genre structure as Rakuten publishes it, looked up by Genre ID, and check how similar items are placed. Prefer the genre in which a shopper who wants this exact item would most naturally look, even if another genre appears more crowded.
Write down why you chose it. If the honest reason is “more traffic” rather than “best fit”, think again: a product placed where it does not belong tends to meet the wrong shoppers.
Step 3 — Align the tags
Draft the tags from the shopper’s side: the attributes they care about (size, material, use, occasion, audience) and the words they would type. Remove tags that do not describe the item. Keep the same wording across variants of one product so that the signals do not contradict each other.
Step 4 — Make one controlled change
Change the genre or the tags, not both and not the price on the same day if you can avoid it. Record the exact time, the old value and the new value. If you manage the shop through a tool or a bulk upload, check afterwards that the saved values are the ones you intended.
Step 5 — Measure over a fair period
Compare a similar period before and after, with the same weekdays and the same campaign conditions where you can. Use the figures available to you in RMS, for example impressions, visits and orders, and R-Karte, Rakuten’s analytics area for shop data, if your account offers it. Expect delay: search and browsing data take time to settle, and a short window can mislead.
Step 6 — Decide: keep, adjust or revert
If the evidence moved the right way, keep the change and move to the next product in the batch. If it did not, check whether the cause was something else you had marked “unknown”. Reverting is a legitimate result and costs you only the records you kept.
Step 7 — Build the routine
Once the batch is done, set a simple routine: a seasonal tag review, an audit after any change to Rakuten’s genre structure, a check when new products are added, and a quarterly look for drift between what you meant and what is saved. Assign it to a person and a date, not to “someday”.
A worked example
Imagine a shop that sells ceramic mugs. Three mugs sit in a general kitchenware genre while similar items from other shops sit in a more specific tableware genre. The owner records the genre IDs, notes that the mugs carry only one tag each, and sees that visits fell after a seasonal campaign ended. Campaign timing is ruled in as a partial cause; placement is marked unknown. The owner moves one mug to the closer genre, adds three accurate tags describing material, capacity and use, and leaves the other two mugs untouched as a comparison.
Three weeks later the owner compares the same weekdays before and after. If the moved mug improved relative to the others, the change is kept and extended. If not, it is reverted and the notes show what to test next. Nothing here is guaranteed; the point is that a small, recorded experiment gives you something to learn from.
Where the book fits
Each step has matching categories in the book overview, and the Placement Command Center keeps your products, genres and tags filled in as you move from step to step. See the complete book page for details, and read why Rakuten search differs from Amazon search if you also sell on other marketplaces.
Sources and verification
Last reviewed 4 October 2026. Rakuten changes its genre structure, search features and Rakuten Merchant Server (RMS) tools from time to time. What follows describes the pages as published by Rakuten at the time of writing, which may change. Always rely on the current wording in your own RMS account and on the official pages below before you act.
Educational guide only. Not legal, tax or financial advice. Independent of, and not affiliated with or endorsed by, Rakuten. No ranking, traffic or sales result is guaranteed.