Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy

So, I’m in the biz, and even I didn’t ‘get it’ when it comes to search engine marketing. And this is after countless presentations at conferences, reading tons of stuff online, etc. Maybe I’m just dense, or maybe I just needed someone like Vanessa Fox to clarify what SEO is, how it works, why I should care, and exactly what I can do about it to help my business (and my clients’ businesses) in plain old ordinary language. With actual examples that make sense.

Sure, I’m biased. I contributed a little info on personas for the book. But I’ve got to tell you, I got way more out of this book than I put it. I’ve learned more from Vanessa’s book–actual, practical methods that tie in perfectly with user experience–than I’ve learned from any other book I’ve read in the past few years.

You’ll love this if you are a marketer who has to worry about SEO (and you all do).

You’ll get a huge amount out of it whether or not you already know anything about SEO and SEM.

You’ll get a brand new perspective if you are a user experience person (because guess what? the conversation you are trying to establish with your users and customers starts waaaay before they arrive at your site!).

You’ll become a savvy consumer of SEO tools and services.

So really, just buy it already. Seriously.

Rating: 5 / 5

A great overview of how businesses can leverage search engine optimization, pay per click and social media tactics as their business and marketing strategy. The book details not just what search engines are looking for, but how you can leverage data and analytics to better promote your business with greater opportunities to be found in search engines or online communities via online marketing tactics. I consider this book as a must have for anyone just getting into marketing or needs to familiarize themselves with SEO and/or online marketing.
Rating: 5 / 5

Every once in a great while a new business book is published that just oozes with credibility and usefulness. Such is the case with Vanessa Fox’s “Marketing in the Age of Google.” Vanessa is a search engine optimization expert and former Google spokesperson. Her book takes off quickly, pointing out that 88% of online search dollars are spent on paid results, but 85% of searchers click on organic (non-paid) results. Slightly over half (56%) of Google searches return no paid ads. Although $9.1 billion was spent on online advertising in 2007, and it is projected to reach $20.9 billion in 2013, improving performance with organic search results is the focus of her book.

Worldwide there are 131 billion searchers/month, 23 billion by Americans. About 12% of U.S. searches are focused on retail items, and 63% of search-related purchases occur offline. Essentially all searchers look at the first organic result, while only 50% look at the first paid result. Fox points out that searchers will tell you exactly what will compel them to buy your products – if only you will look for the answers. Information within Google Insights for Search and Google Trends can reveal the relative popularity of similar search terms, trends and seasonality in their popularity, where (geographically) most inquiries are coming from. Other sources for useful sights include Google Adwords (Fox suggests trying a few ads, if only for the information retrieved), Google Analytics (reports number of visits, time on site, number of pages visited, bounce rate), Compete.com (degree of competition associated with various search terms), and [...] (what sites and search terms are driving visitors to your site). [...] and others can help alert marketers to PR disasters in the making before they get too far.

Must reading, and ownership for any marketer.

Rating: 5 / 5

It amazes me: businesses big and small are allocating increasing amounts of coin to an assortment of internet related initiatives without having their heads around the basics of search engine dynamics (and I’m not talking about cheap and fast SEO ‘trickery’). What Vanessa Fox has so effectively achieved with this book is to provide anyone interested – and anyone running an organisation should be – with a systematic framework to incorporate search into their tactical and strategic decision making fabric. Knowing thy customer has long been a business imperative – and so why would anyone pass up on a free peek into Google’s treasure trove of historical and live search data? And why would anybody not want to know how to rank well on a wide and deep range of directly related search queries, land qualified traffic onto their online properties, to then drive these leads through to ready and waiting calls to action? Beats me. This hints at a more fundamental problem – people don’t know what they don’t know. This book – more a guide really – is a business gem. Read it and then you’ll know.
Rating: 5 / 5

So much of marketing is focused on the company broadcasting out in the hope of bumping into a potential customer. Meanwhile there are 18 billion individual ‘Broadcasts’ each month from people who want your help.

Ms. Fox also talks about how online search drives offline purchases and I really learned a lot from the section that discussed using search data as marketing research. She says:

“Search data is the greatest form of market research there is. If the marketers job is to discern wants & needs and then fulfill them…then studying behavior is way more valuable than studying what people think is the right answer when they take a survey.”

We also love that the core message here supports exactly what we help with here @ Compendium. Check out this line from the book:

“For most searches, the home page is not the entry point. Any page can be the entry page. We have to rethink our approach to site design and user interaction based on the new world.”

Rating: 5 / 5