The first thing you will probably do is to google for these search terms:SEO services or SEO company, maybe you’re also use SEO specialists and SEO consultants. In fact it is more likely that you use the first 2 search terms.

How do I know?

Because, Google Suggest suggested these search terms when you type in “seo”.

First, you have to make sure whether you are looking for a SEO specialist or a SEO Consultant. So what’s the difference?

SEO Consultants

You look for SEO consultant if you or your company has an existing web design team – in-house or outsourced, it doesn’t really matter. The SEO consultant will some along, study and analyze your website and competitors’ websites, and develop a strategy for your to improve your search engine visibility and search ranking. Usually, she does not do the actual optimization of your website codes and build links for you. Your existing web development team will have to do the actually work.

SEO Specialists

As for a SEO specialist, she will more likely to do most of the tweaking of the codes, internal linking and link building campaign.

When you hire a SEO consultant to improve your website, she may in get her SEO specialists to do the grunt work such as tweak the HTML of your website, re-linking or re-structure the internal linking, and build links for you.

So you will have to make sure what you are paying for: the advice only or the advice plus the grunt work.

Here’s an article to help you Choose A SEO Company to do the search engine optimization for your website.

If you ever need SEO services or a SEO consultant, he is one person that I’ll recommend.

I met him this morning at Parco Bugis Junction. He was in Singapore for a short business cum shopping trip. Larry is based in Malaysia. Yes, Malaysian helping Singapore companies to optimize their websites.

Singapore SEO vs Malaysia SEO

We had a long talk, nearly 2 hours, about the prospect of providing SEO services. There is definitely a growing demand for SEO/SEM related services. More companies are willing to pay to get their websites into Google and Yahoo search results. Apparently, according to Larry, Singapore companies are more willing to allocate budget for SEO than Malaysia companies.

So is there really a demand for SEO in Malaysia? How big is this demand compared with Singapore market?

I am not familiar with the Malaysia market. So I came home and did a quick research.

A Little Research on Malaysia SEO Market

I used Google Trends and here’s the results for terms “hong kong”, “malaysia”, “singapore” & “sex”. We know there is lots of traffic for the search term “sex”, so I used it to act as the basis of comparison to reflect the magnitude of the market.

In the chart/table below, you’ll see that the number of searches for the term “singapore” is about 10 times that of “sex” for traffic from Singapore. In Hong Kong, the number of searches for “hong kong” is 5 times that of “sex”.

Unfortunately, the chart/table above does not give me direct answers. I need to do a bit more analysis in the data to deduce some answers.

We can see that there are many people in Singapore using the term “Singapore” in their searches. These people are looking for information, products, services and etc. in Singapore or related to Singapore e.g. “SEO training in Singapore”. With so many people using the search engine to look for information, it is no doubt that there is more companies in Singapore spending money to get into top Google and Yahoo search ranking.

Singapore SEO Market Twice As Large?

Now, let’s look at Malaysia. Take note the data was presented for 2 cities: Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya. The number of searches for Malaysia related information is about 80% of Singapore numbers. So the difference is not so big.

In other words, for every 10 SEO jobs in Singapore, there are 8 in KL and PJ (if the conditions in all the 3 cities are same).

When we factor in the difference in currencies, a person based in Malaysia will find job in Singapore twice as lucrative as a job in KL and PJ. So in dollar terms, Singapore current market size, in terms of US$, could be twice as large as Malaysia’s.

No wonder, Larry prefers to have Singapore clients paying in Singdollars to looking for Malaysian clients who pay in Ringgits.

Last week, I met with Yvonne to discuss how I could help her company to promote their services online. The company aims to capture clients that are Internet savvy and open to online transaction. Yvonne was particular interested to use Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions to launch the marketing campaign.

To better position myself for this growing need for search marketing service, I registered a new domain www.searchmarketing.sg last week. I also revised www.mywebculture.com to reflect to realignment of web hosting business to search marketing business.