As mentioned in a previous post, I attended the Search Engine Marketing Expo in Singapore.

It was a good insight- interesting questions raised and some interesting sessions conducted. But I could see that many service providers were still not at complete terms with the unique nuances of the Asian region and even search engine marketing issues. Or maybe they did not come across like that.

I have always maintained that what this market needs is evangelists and champions- with experience in not only the discipline but also knowledge within the region. The international companies have more experience- and once they get good people within the region, they stand a better chance at succeding in the market- and free markets imply they should- if they deliver a better package

Will summarize the learnings and some photos and slides from the conference:

The first day had interesting sessions on:

• SEM for the CEO: By Gillian Muessig of SEOMOz
  • Topline overview. Good but stats were outdated- recent stats could have added a great deal to the presentation
• Measuring offline success of Search Marketing: Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media
  • Addressed the common issues that marketers face. I get this question all the time from CEOs, product managers and brand managers- how could we attribute offline sales to online and vice versa. Having actually implemented some of this stuff, I know that there are some things that work better than others- and great to see that International counterparts in more advanced markets also had similar concepts
• Reporting and performance Metrics for the boss: Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal
  • Good and insightful for a session addressing decision makers and Search metrics and reporting professionals. More like web anlaytics 101 but presented well. Key takeout- put data in context and always balance data with the right counterpart.

Gillian from SEO Moz

• An interesting session was the end of the day Site clinic- where the panel took site addresses from people and briefly discussed what could they improve in their sites to make them more SEO (and user) friendly

Day 2 Search Engine Bootcamp

I had decided to attend Search Engine Optimization/SEO sessions but ended up splitting my time with Paid Search sessions.

Michael Motherwell from MMIT at Search Marketing Singapore Expo on Web 2.0 and Search Engine Optimization. I felt a lot more could be covered in this session on topics like- How to utilize Social Media and Web 2.0 for search Engine Optimization OR more specific issues like ‘how to make your digital assets like video, articles, press releases, audio content etc work for you’- could have been more interesting.

Good slide from Gillian of SEoMoz on Search Engine Friendly Web design

Cindy Krum from Rank-mobile, Gillian from SEoMoz and Wayne Eo from OOM

Goal of keyword research- One good slide

In case you are looking for Search Engine Marketing agency from Singapore or South east Asia, let me know