At the Chiang Mai SEO Conference in Chiang Mai Thailand, more than 750 Super Affiliates, Agency and Inhouse SEOs, Decision Makers and Investors come together every year to talk for two days about search engine optimization and making money online.
The presentations on the main stage range from the usual SEO topics such as onsite optimization and link building to marketing psychology and topics from the affiliate business and marketplace commerce (Amazon & eBay).
Disclaimer: For now this article was translated from German into English with DeepL.com and we will clean the language later next week, when it’s not 9pm after the conference day and my stomach screams for food and after parter beers. 😉
Chiang Mai SEO Conference Pre- & Recaps
Here you can find pre- and recaps of the “Chiang Mai SEO Conference” events of the last years. The official Twitter hash day is CMSEO plus year, for example #CMSEO2019.
CMSEO 2018
The Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2018 was my first CMSEO and at the same time my first online marketing conference especially for the Asian market.
I participated together with my then boss Jan-Peter Ruhso from crawlOPTIMIZER and my friends Max (guymax) and Max (SEO Atelier), as well as German industry colleagues from various companies like Allianz and agencies like OneAdvertising.
- Recap on guymax (English)
The content of the conference was very interesting for me, although I could hardly take any new SEO knowledge with me. But why did I find it interesting?
I learned at the CMSEO2018:
If you consider the topics and their depth of content of the SEO conference in Chiang May 2018 as a mirror of the professional competence or let’s say better the qualitative challenge in SEO for the Asian region, then “those over there are technically still something behind Europe” and in any case still not on the SEO level of North America for some time. This is interesting and in my opinion is due to two things:
- Google is also the market leader among search engines in Asia. And as you can see when you play around with Google Translate, Google hardly gets along with Thai and Chinese at all. If the machine doesn’t understand the language, doesn’t have a good dictionary and doesn’t form logical sentences, the qualitative evaluation of the content doesn’t work either. Of course, Google cannot assign this content to the search queries that are quite complex due to the language search.
- At least in Thailand, eCommerce is still at the very beginning, because people can shop offline at very low prices and like to go to the big shopping malls anyway. And there is also no great security for the consumer in Thailand, such as secure payment systems, legally regulated cancellation rights and anyway no reliable parcel deliveries to the gigantic condominiums, post offices or Packstations. For this reason, returning parcels is not easy either. If eCommerce is not very large, Google cannot collect data on it so quickly and the trade does not necessarily rush for SEO for its own online shops.
The audience was busy taking notes when a speaker said you should use the keyword at the beginning of the title because it helps with ranking. So there were a lot of absolute beginners in the audience. So the level of the presentations was just right and I am happy that the many SEO newbies got exactly the information they need.
CMSEO 2019
Chaing Mai is simply a cool place for an SEO conference. Flights and conference ticket prices aren’t more expensive than a two-day SMX card and you can also take part in the three-day Loi Krathong River Festival before the Chiang Mai SEO Conference, enjoy Thai food and hang out a bit with the Digital Nomads community in Chiang Mai. So I also took part in the CMSEO in 2019.
Date: 2019-11-14 – 2019-11-15
Here you can find my Recap to CMSEO2019 as well as links to presentations and the recording of the LiveStreams.
Day 1
Matt Diggity
keynote
- Making Money With SEO Is Becoming Easier and Easier
- People worldwide shop more and more online
- many SEOs give up because it is becoming more complex, many companies try it themselves, but do not have the experience and human power
- there are more fields in which you can specialize
- Matt believes good keyword research is crucial
- main keyword synonyms, user intend and question keywords should be distributed to the various onpage elements such as headings h2-h4
- WDF*IDF and so on work with him always
- Without inbound links it doesn’t work as with links
- Links need relevance, trust and power
- He uses the old trick with the link pyramid, which SEOs all over the world have already classified as no longer effective, or even harmful, many years ago.
Matt Diggity is the organizer of the Chiang Mai SEO Conference and manages to gather online marketers with 7-digit incomes and SEO newcomers from more than 30 countries at a conference in Chiang Mai.
Kyle Roof
Google Algorithm is an Algorithm
- Google is an algorithm.
- If it is an algorithm, then it is mathematics.
- If it is math, then
- we can observe it (Aristotle)
- we can test it (Marconi)
- it is rational (Descartes)
- we can make theories about it (Newton)
- we can make predictions (Hailey)
- it must not remain a mere matter of opinion (Plato)
- we can learn about it by asking questions (Socrates)
- we no longer need (SEO) myths! (Thales)
Kyle Roof is a former lawyer and founder of Pageoptimizer Pro, among others. Here he shares the results of some SEO tests.
Viktor Karpenko
From $0 to $100k per month in the casino niche
- Viktor has built new and Expired Domains and with Link Pyramids he’s raised the bar… um … optimized.
- He uses about 50-100 pages per domain and 300 links at 1-50$ each.
- Two things seemed to be important to him:
- If the horse is dead, you descend. Don’t waste any time if you assume after two or three months that this domain will never climb, then tick off and start from scratch.
- Hiring the right people and motivating them to work on clearly defined goals.
- He doesn’t care about the negative SEO that is common in the gambling industry, because he only has to get into the top10. Since his websites have good UX and CRO, they stay there from now on because of the good user signals.
- My Favourite
- Viktor said something that I live already so I felt approval for my behaviour (which I thought is kind of nerdy slash weird): Viktor said “Watch ahrefs like people watch Netflix”.
- He recommendet what I also like to do, and that is grabbing a beer and check all kind of sites with ahrefs (or in my case also sometimes with SISTRIX for the German market).
- #ahrefsandchill
Viktor works with small teams of 1-5 people in 30 countries for the local markets and believes that a site must rank after 12 months. His affiliate sites make $40-280,000 in revenue after the first year.
Empire Flippers
The multiple million dollar end game for content sites
- Become a Brand
- Think like a media company
- Get traffic from all possible channels
- Start now!
I liked the short presentation because I often complain that marketers, no matter which channel, think only of themselves. SEOs should also think about traffic from PPC, social, email and even offline campaigns.
Empire flippers value thinking about exits. Most projects should be provided with a lot of traffic (from all possible channels) and then sold to push the remaining projects from the profit and build new projects with exit goal:
- build 5 Authority pages
- sell 4 and keep the best
- improve the best and build 4 new ones
- sell again 4 and keep the best
- repeat that and build a team so that you can scale
Stacey McNaught
Outreach Bloggers journalists tactics
- Bloggers open inquiries to guest articles and left rather, if in the subject clearly something is written like paid Blogpost or Advertising
- Journalists often follow a code and they should be offered something
- real news
- Features
- Real stories from the lives of real people
- trustworthy specialist sources and expert statements
- interesting products
- It is best to research suitable journalists on the subject manually, note what they write and write the cover letters individually for each journalist personally.
Jonathan Kiekbusch
The Sleeping Giant Strategy
- Set achievable goals
- recruit the right team
- Create standardized processes and document them as video, presentation and transcription
- Motivate your team and keep them productive and happy
- Work for your business, not your business
Jonathan founded SEObutler and 79Ads and has two things in mind:
- delegate wherever possible
- be empathetic with your employees
Charles Floate
What you learn from building over a million dollars of links a year
- his favorite link types in 2019
- High level editorials
- Nieschen-relevant guest articles
- Niche relevant articles
- niche PBNs for Level 2 domains
- Citations, Social Profiles and Sponsorship Links
- Make it clear that you have to look at your Anchor texts completely and draw conclusions from them; it is best to list all links in Excel and calculate the Anchor Text Ratio per page and for the whole domain, except there are more than a few hundred.
- Links from High Authority pages can also have hard exact match anchors
- Quality instead of quantity
- Quality is not based on DA and DR, but you have to check manually that everything is just super built and looks super clean.
- All languages in the world except English, Spanish and German can be properly linked to old school, with exact match anchors
- You can check for “online casino” or “casino” the best ranking page on Anchor Text Variation for countries like Sweden or Chile. What you find there is frightening for us here 😀
Day 2
Gael Breton
Taking your sites to the next level: The Kaizen Approach to Site Building
- It might work better to just copy existing contents that rank well, instead of trying a totally new and better content structure. Google sometimes doesn’t reward hard work and quality
- when it comes to featured snippets, it works well, to put the Google Suggest queries into h2 and h3 and add up to 300 characters of text to it
- E-A-T: Gael did a research on the authors of best ranking content and he couldn’t find any correlation between ranking and an academic title of the authors
- Google rewrites 50% of all title tags – but what does that mean? Individualization for the particular queries or just bad title tag copy?
- Gael saw better rankings on pages that have an h1 that differes from the page title
Travis Jamison
How to add zeros to your projects by thinking like an investor
- Read the early books from Warren Buffett and adapt its rules to your Online Marketing
- Wait for the obvious wins before you invest
- Know what you are good at and ignore everything else
Travis said he started poor and worked his way up. His 7 exits so far brought him from $47k to $12MM and he thinks that seven out of ten invests wont pay out and just burn your money.
I think this talk was a good addition to day one’s presentation by Empire Flippers about building and selling projects.
Nick Nimmin
YouTube Mastery – How to leverage the fastest growing traffic source on the planet
I like Nick and his Videos. He gave small practical hands on tipps, you can use directly to improve your YouTube success. Best thing would be, you just watch some videos from his channel.
Grant Simmons
Rock Solid SEO – Big Ideas, big challenges, massive solutions
- Build a brand and create great content with the goal to satisfy your users.
- Also keep your site structure clear and clean.
- If the corporate you are trying to help with their SEO just won’t listen to you, create your own site and do everything they declined and enjoy “your own” rankings.
List of all presentation slides
follows
CMSEO2019 LiveStream Videos
Tips for CMSEO
This is how you can get the most out of your private and professional life!
If you have never been to the CMSEO before or never been to Chiang Mai (Thailand), you will get a lot of really helpful tips from me.
I have already flown four times to Chiang Mai and have lived there in different accommodations like private apartments, in guest houses together with a Thai family and in several pensions and hotels.
I was on the road a lot during the day and evening and can tell you how to get the most out of your stay in Chiang Mai from the conference and the free time before and after.
Getting to the SEO Conference in Chiang Mai Thailand
This is easy to explain: there are very cheap flights to Chiang Mai (CNX) airport from Bangkok. Several times a day you can fly there for about 15€ and take a licensed taxi for about 150 Baht (8€) directly to the city center.
Tip: Get a Thai SIM card at the airport. They will be activated directly by the friendly staff there and loaded with enough credit for 1-14 days. That costs hardly anything and one has for example 6GB data volume in the 4G/LTE net for the own Instagram Story, Google Maps navigation or which one would like to do otherwise so mobile on-line. For example truemove.
Best accommodation in Chiang Mai: Hotel or AirBnB?
First of all: AirBnB in Thailand is difficult and you can hardly find luxurious offers. I always choose hotels.
As the best accommodation for the SEO Conference in Chiang Mai I recommend to stay directly in Meridan. If you are staying in the same hotel where the conference takes place, you can load your mobile phone into your room or have a Power Nap after lunch.
However, I like to stay much cheaper in hotels that are less than 10 minutes walk from the conference hotel Le Meridan. I like to live away from the hustle and bustle and not meet other online people 24/7. But of course you decide for yourself.
- Riverside House Hotel
- Raming Lodge (9 minutes walk through the most popular party street in Chiang Mai)
- Nidhra Lanna (a bit further, but 4x Tuktuk is fun too)
- Le Pure Chiang Mai (also only possible with Tuktuk, but great interior design)
Around the conference hotel and the alternatives mentioned there are many Thai and Westerner bars and restaurants. There is also a small food court and a night market where you can always buy fresh food and snacks.
My tip: on the second day in the small break in the afternoon, get out of the hotel and drink a cold Beer Chang in one of the bars before the last lecture.
The whole area also has hairdressers, supermarkets, tailors and laundries, everything you need for a few days during the Chiang Mai SEO Conference.
Before and after the conference
Onliner & SEO Meetups, Parties and add-on Workshops
The Chiang Mai SEO Conference actually starts several days before the actual conference. Matt Diggity organizes alone and together with other online marketers many Meetups, Co-Working Days and Parties.
Sometimes there are topics to discuss and sometimes it’s just casual collaboration or a beer after work.
These side events, as well as the free workshops that can be booked, can be found very easily via the Facebook group and the CMSEO group in the app “Goodevent”. Via the app you can also connect with other participants, chat and arrange private meetings. Of course, this is also possible via Facebook.
Activities in Chiang Mai – My personal tips
If you’ve never been to Chiang Mai before and are interested in the culture of (Northern) Thailand, you may well need this short list of tips. What can you do in Chiang Mai and what should you see there?
– Lanna Museum
– Muay Thai Boxing
– Rooftop terrace with dinner Maya
– Cheap shopping in …mall
– Party in the Zoe in Yellow Bar-Area with several bars, food stalls and low drinks prices (Facebook)
All my personal favorites can be found in this Google Maps list for Chiang Mai. These are my favorite places in Chiang Mai, like sightseeing, leisure and mobile working or co-working. Also some hotels where I felt comfortable.