I’ll be in Toronto for the Conference & Expo on June 8th and 9th. Please feel free to connect with me if you are also attending the show.

Getting the best of Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2009
Since SES is the biggest Canadian show in our industry, we (NVI) are looking to grow our presence in order to position NVI as a leading Canadian internet marketing company. In addition to our CEO’s () presentation on Canada-specific SEO + PPC Issues, (NVI’s SEO Team Lead) will also be part of a panel covering site performance tuning and SEO. On the top of that, NVI is also as well as into the sponsorship of the . I’m looking forward to be in Toronto, hopefully I’ll meet you there, see you at the show!

How Canadian search industry is different than the American? According to Yahoo’s SEM National Director, , Canadian companies might be missing the boat. We are way behind the States in SEM expenses. Byrne made for online banking services. While they are about 10 PPC ads in yahoo.com, there are about 5 sponsor results in yahoo.ca and even less when searching in French. These results show that Canadian companies don’t take all the opportunity available.

Eric Morris, points out 3 main differences:
1- Canadians are very loyal to Google in comparison of other countries
2- We are facing a bilingual reality
3- the industry is much more developed in the States

According to Morris, US companies have already shifted budgets from traditional channels to internet marketing. While Canadian begin to use and understand all the possibilities of analytics, US companies focus on the next steps of search such as contextual targeting for mobile.

Last on the panel, Guillaume Bouchard from NVI presented a look a the landscape of the SEM in Province of Qubec. Guillaume said that online sales would probably be higher if debit payment was widely accepted because Quebecers use more debit than credit card payment which is not the case in the States. It seems that Quebec users trust their banks before 3rd party websites such as PayPal. Also good to know that Quebec online market is mainly owned by 3 actors: PowerCorp, Transcontinental and Quebecor.

I’m leaving today for SES Toronto ‘08 with 6 of my colleagues. will be presenting on the State of Search Marketing in Canada panel and I plan to cover some of the panels during the two days event. I know that Simon and from Adviso will also be there. I don’t know about other Montrealers (I think Mitch is presenting also). In fact, I didn’t get the chance to take a look at the speakers but that I might be covering:

-Universal & Blended Search
-The State of Search Marketing in Canada
-Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions
-What’s Different About B2B? Tailored Strategies
-Social Media Success
-Web 2.0 & Search Engines
-Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Which Campaign Sold What?

update: Some , so far

Thanks for the people at who provided me a media pass for the whole event! More to come…