If you’re involved in SEO, it’s likely that at one point or another, the city “Chiang Mai” has come up in conversation.
Chiang Mai is a city in northern Thailand.
It’s a beautiful city that affords a very high quality of living, offers amazing food, and beautiful nature.
But why is Chiang Mai a hotspot for SEO?
What draws so many talented SEOs to come visit year after year, and many of them to stay indefinitely?
Let’s take a look.
And if you prefer a video version of this post, watch the video below.
Table Of Contents
What’s So Special About Chiang Mai?
There’s essentially four main reasons why Chiang Mai is so popular amongst the SEO population.
Reason #1 – Quality of Life
Geoarbitrage: A well understood financial concept where disparities between markets are leveraged to generate or broker a return.
In a nutshell, your hard earned dollars, euros, etc, are going to be worth a lot more where the Thai baht is much weaker in comparison.
Put it this way…
- You can find a pretty nice apartment for only $400/month.
- You can eat very well for $5-10 per day.
- A full body massage is about $5.50/hour
Read more about the cost of living in Chiang Mai here.
Reason #2 – Everything is Easy
In Chiang Mai, everything you want or need is at your finger tips.
- Feel like working at a cafe? There’s 100’s of nice cafe’s with excellent coffee and blazing fast fiber optic Wifi. Chiang Mai can get to be quite warm in its hottest seasons, but cafes tend to blast their AC and make things quite comfortable.
- Want to meet some friends across town? Jump on your scooter and you’re there in 10 minutes flat, which is a pleasure in itself.
Chiang Mai also hosts a slew of excellent coworking spots, which are great to work at and provide an venue for networking opportunities.
Reason #3 – Thai Culture
Thailand is called the “Land of Smiles” for good reason.
And no, I’m not talking just about the beautiful women of the region, but the everyday people that travel through life with welcoming smiles on their faces every day.
Thai people, especially in Chiang Mai, are incredibly friendly, warm, and gracious. At their same time, their culture and food are so rich and delicious, its easy to fall in love with the country.
The open friendliness is highly contagious.
In no time, even travelers start to adopt this friendliness as well.
My friend, Tyler Perez (SEO from Los Angeles) was shocked when he saw how friendly everyone is here. “Matt, why is everyone so damn nice?”
Reason #4 – The Digital Nomad Scene
A Digtial Nomad is essentially a person who owns an location-independent business, which they run while traveling the world.
Forbes featured an article, highlighting Chiang Mai as being the heart of the whole movement. During the high season, Digital Nomad chicks and dudes flock to Chiang Mai to get beast mode on their businesses in a great environment for entrepreneurship.
Every week you’ll find meet ups related not only to SEO, but also FBA, dropshipping, PPC, and every other flavor of online entrepreneurship.
Chiang Mai is extremely start-up friendly because of low costs and the incredible learning resources available to bootstrappers.
Many of them end up failling in love with Chiang Mai and make a permanent decision to stay.
Which Seos Have or Currently Live in Chiang Mai?
- Kyle Roof
- Glen Allsopp
- Kurt Phillip
- Alex Azoury
- Daryl Rosser
- Will Tribe
- Karl Kangur
Rob Atkinson- Diggy Dirk
- Kevin Graham
- Jesse Hanley
- Stinus Hojensbo
- Anthony Lam
- Dan Joseph
- Karl Kangur
- Josh Kelly
- Josh Larsen
- Sia Mohajer
- Oliver Sketchley-Kaye
- Tim Sutton
- Brendan Tully
- Morgan Westerman
- Jay Yap
- Myself
- … and many more.
What Kind of SEO Events Go On?
The Chiang Mai SEO Conference
From 2017 to 2019 we held the Chiang Mai SEO Conference, Thailand’s first-ever conference based strictly on SEO.
Each year was a sell-out event, as 800+ came to Chiang Mai for a week of presentations, workshops, coworking and more networking than you could handle.
Get information on the next Chiang Mai SEO Conference
And watch this video, if you’re interested in why we built the Chiang Mai SEO conference.
Chiang Mai SEO Co-working Sessions
Every Thursday, all the local SEOs get together from 1-4 pm at one of many coworking spots or coffee shops.
The format rotates every week.
One week it might be a presentation on an SEO topic. The next week it could be a SEO quiz game for SEO t-shirts and other swag.
We also do site audits and tear-downs.
The Invitation-only Chiang Mai SEO Mastermind
63 high-earning SEO experts from all over the world came together for this annual event.
Format:
Groups of 5-7 are formed based upon speciality (affilaite, client SEO, software, etc). Each invitee is given 15 minutes to describe their business and the challenges they are facing. Then for 45 minutes, the other top-tier experts in your group will help you solve these problems.
This mastermind has been an welcome tradition that we plan to keep up for years to come.
When Should You Come to Chiang Mai?
The best months to come to Chiang Mai are October – February.
These are considered the “high season” months.
Typically, the SEO population of the city rises quite significantly as people flock to Chiang Mai for its ideal weather and high concentration of digital entrepreneurs.
For the rest of the year, most permanent SEO’s start to travel a bit more. In the months of February and March, most SEOs are gone completely due to the smoky season.
Travel Tip: Before you visit make sure to check in with whomever you want to see in town to make sure they’ll be in Chiang Mai. Especially outside of the high season.
One thing about folks living in Chiang Mai… we’re all here, because we’re essentially vagabonds. We love travel and we do it with a passion. So it’s always a possibility that whomever you want to visit might be out of country.
Check in first.
Resources
Here’s some additional resources for you to check out before your visit to Chiang Mai.
- Chiang Mai SEO Community Facebook Group
- Chiang Mai Digital Nomads Facebook Group
- Momentum Travel – Owning a Business in Chiang Mai
- New York Post – Why Millenials are Starting Businesses Overseas
- Things to Do in Chiang Mai
Thank you for reading. We hope to see you sometime in the near future.
