SEO Indochina is not so much a site as a business model and strategy for an area best characterized in the modern vernacular as the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS).

Location, Location, Location

Indochina has several meanings, but there are several features, besides whatever the French were up to in the 19th century.

• Indochina is a word that defines something that it is not, namely not India and not China
• Indochina is similar and sometimes equivalent to Mainland Southeast Asia
• In it’s most inclusive definition (and that is how we use it here) Indochina as a concept includes the following countries and areas, which also has the definition of the “Greater Mekong Sub-Region” (GMS)
  • Cambodia
  • Laos
  • Myanmar (Burma)
  • Thailand
  • Viet Nam
  • Yunnan Province (and sometimes the Guangxi Province) of China

The GMS covers an area of 2.6 million square kilometers, the size of Western Europe, with a population of about 325 million, including the Yunnan province of China. This is a large potential market, with abundant but un-exploited natural resources.

Southeast Asia as a collection of 12 countries is quite impressive, a 900bn GDP and 3 trillion PPP, over half a billion people spread over 500 million square kms.

Indochina is a bit smaller (especially without massive Indonesia) and has around 225m people.

SEO in Indochina

We believe that SEO and other complementary related markets and offerings present unique opportunities in the five main countries, based on some similarities and differences

• Thailand and Vietnam (65m and 90m population) have approximately 25% Internet penetration rates, compared with about 65% in the US
• Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have miniscule Internet penetration for political and economic reasons, but together have around 70m people (~7m in Laos, ~15m in Cambodia and nearly 50m in Myanmar).
• Each country’s main language uses a non-Latin character set (Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Thai, and Vietnamese).
• For various historical reasons, these languages are understood by significant populations within each neighboring country.
• Uneven development of Tourism across the region

Outside of Bangkok and Phuket, SEO is largely undeveloped, including places like Saigon, Viet Nam, though this won’t stay this way forever, or perhaps even for very long.

SEO Indochina Strategy

The main idea is to link several complementary offerings and markets together and produce useful destination websites, products, and services which reinforce brands along with leveraging an infrastructure which can scale to serve the region.

SEO Indochina Infrastructure

The core feature of the organization is nimble and flexible product innovation. To do that we leverage technologies and platforms which allow us to scale operations from a single location, country, platform and product offering to multiple locations, countries, platforms and product offerings. One part of the infrastructure is organizational and process and project management and operations, and the other is technological and encompasses the target platforms and marketing strategy.

SEO Indochina Component Offerings

Besides the five countries of mainland Southeast Asia we have a “greater” Southeast Asia region which includes many of the remaining 12 countries in SE Asia as well as Guangxi and Yunnan, two provinces of China. There is also a non-geographic “region” which can also leverage the content management and distribution platform being developed, but is self-referencing and unrelated to the language and cultural offerings discussed below.

In the main five country regions (and to a partial extent in the sixth greater SEAsia region), there are five main divisions:

• Foreign Language learning of the target country language(s)
• English as a foreign (second) language learning of the local population
• Local cuisine and culinary cultures
• Local directory services, focused on in-country local businesses
• SEO, SEM, Ecommerce and Internet Marketing services for local businesses

SEO Indochina Markets

The primary and initial market is to create innovative products and services for English-language travelers in the target countries.