As a search engine marketing company, I (we) take a vested interest not only in local search (meaning North America), but how search is doing around the world - how its growing, what others are doing and where its going. Search in North America is huge, of course, and we always here about how the hispanic market is an up-and-comer in the search space. But let me ask you, what about Asian-Pacific?

Let me hit you with a fact from a study that just came out: Asia-Pacific receives 5 million more searches then North America monthly. Here’s a chart that breaks down searches, based upon region:

You don’t here too much about the Asia-Pacific SEO/M market. I rarely see any talks about SEO in Asia, but Asia-Pacific countries represent a HUGE amount of searches every…single…month. Here’s the kicker: We can all agree that GOOG is the authority when it comes to search engineering in North America. They’re getting pretty good at it in the US of A. And for my fellow SEO’s who target alternative Google engines, you can attest to the difficulty in ranking in a “foreign” search engine, rather then to Google’s TLD. Having said all that, why haven’t you started to lay the ground work for an SEO force in Asia-Pacific?

Here’s a supporting chart:

Baidu and Naver (NHN Corp.) are killing it. They’re bringing in tons and tons (and tons) of search traffic, but you never hear about them. C’mon…Baidu is even getting more traffic then MSN Live.

There’s a huge opportunity to start working with Asia-Pacific businesses: 搜索引擎營銷.

Charts Source: Marketing Charts

Wow, I can’t believe the price tag - $5,000,000. Yup, you read that right, 5 million dollars. DotSauce is where I found out about this. That domain has you pigeon-holed into only that industry. SEO is advancing into much more then just search engine optimization. Here at SEM Inc., we chose search engine marketing because its not just about getting rankings from search engines or paying to get there, but its about landing pages from search engines, its about conversions, stats and revenue. Even though “SEM” stands for “Search Engine Marketing”, I might change it to “Simply Effective Marketing”. But that’s besides the point…kind of drifted there.

With $5,000,000 you could definitely start a number of companies. Guy started Treumors for $12,000. If that’s all it takes to build out Web 2.0 sites, think if you had a $5 million budget. You could launch 2 Web 2.0 applications a week for a year at that budget.

Good luck Mike with your new domain.