Customer Reviews

The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book for anyone just getting started with Search Engine Marketing as the author gives a great overview of the steps needed to set up pay per click campaigns.

Advanced users might find it a bit basic, but that's not who this book is designed for. This book is designed for the small business owner who knows Search Engine Marketing is an important web traffic driver for his/her business, needs to get up to speed fast, and wants someone to explain it sequentially.

The author does a great job in setting up Search Engine Marketing step-by-step in an easy to follow way that should be very helpful to anyone who has never run a marketing team and needs to learn to do this themselves.

There are more advanced books out there for those who need to delve into the nitty-gritty, but if you are just getting started, and are a non-technical person who wants easy to follow instructions, then this book is a must read.

I will keep this short and simple. I am a web developer ( stuffdone.com ) but not an SEO expert. I thought I would start to learn more.

I bought the book.
I followed the instructions.
I now have THREE different sites on page one of Yahoo ( without paying them their $299 fee! )
and one on page one of Google. All within two weeks of reading the book.

It works !
The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing

As a beginner, I learned so much from this book, with easily understandable language and concepts...even I could do it!
LeAnn Thieman

Heather Lutze pours out her knowledge of how to be found on the Internet in the book The Findability Formula. This unique formula is Lutze's guide to search engine marketing. Heather has ten years of management experience in the field and is the owner of Lutze Consulting. The findability Formula is a step-by-step guide to how to maximize a company's pay-per-click marketing. It also is a guide to search engine optimization.
In the first part of the book Lutze starts out with the basic aspects of search engine optimization. She explains some basic definitions like what exactly findability is. Then Heather goes into what search engines are and how they operate. The difference between a natural search and paid placement is gone over in detail. She wants to make sure that the reader really knows what the difference between the two is. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are all covered as well.

The next couple of chapters dive into what exactly a person needs to do before they start their online marketing. Good clicks and bad clicks are differentiated. Then the meat of what Lutze's book is hit. How people search and what they search for is laid out. She explains what her take on the average persons "buying cycle' is. And it is pretty basic and makes perfect since. There are three stages according to Heather and they are the information, shopping and purchasing stages.

In the fourth chapter Lutze gets into the finer aspects of what she means. She starts off with the "keyword trail". In this chapter, like the book, she has the reader think in the big picture and then narrows it down. She wants the reader to think about what they would type into a search engine to find their product. If the reader sells Nike Air Jordans then they don't want to pay for bees wax as a keyword. Shoes are even too broad for Lutze. Heather explains that the keywords get more expensive the broader the keyword and with less turnover rate. She suggests using the keyword Nike Air Jordans, because it is narrow and will cost less with a bonus of a high turnover rate.

Throughout the chapters Lutze is constantly tying her three stages of purchasing into the book. The three stages of information, shopping and purchasing require three very different ways to go about the keywords. The information stage is the stage where broad words are needed. This stage is where the customer is just gathering information about what product they want and the perks and flaws it has. The shopping stage is where the customer will use about three words and it is a little more specific, like Nike Air Jordans. The customer knows what they want and are just looking around for the best price or service. Then in the purchasing stage the customer has their credit card out and is just looking for exactly what they want, at what price and what service they want with it.

Lutze goes into a lot of detail about what exactly the reader can do to get the most out of the three stages. She dives into geographic modifiers, time restraints, how to get the most out the keywords and what to do after the marketing is up and going. Heather even goes into step-by-step ways of how to do things on her favorite web site.

I thought that this book was a great starter. Lutze goes into great detail and takes the reader through the whole process. It was nice that she didn't assume that the reader knew anything. She also did a great job of explaining exactly why she is telling you to do something. Her main goal is to let the reader have a good overview so they can do it themselves or at least have a good idea so that they can have input into their search engine campaign. Lutze also emphasizes knowing your customer and what they are going through.

The only downside of the book is that it is a little repetitious. She will explain things over and over a bit to remind you how the aspect is relevant to the new subject. But this is the pain that is minimal and bearable to learn Lutze's style. But all and all a good book that I recommend for beginners.

I found the title of this book and the book description to be a little misleading. I thought I was purchasing a book that described a complete approach to Search Engine Marketing and SEO. This book devotes practically every chapter to Google AdWords and only one brief final chapter on SEO/improving organic search ranking. In fact, the author even states that an entire second book would be needed to cover the topic. I thought I WAS buying that book based on the product description. On a positive note, this book is great for anyone just getting their feet wet with pay-per-click advertising. The author explains that this should be the first step in getting on the first page of a search engine, but I did not expect the entire book to be on this one subject. I just feel mislead by the book title and the way it was marketed.

I bought this book to understand the concepts and methods behind search engine marketing and it is exactly what this book delivers. It explains sufficiently how people search on the web according to their buying phase, how to research your keywords, how to organize and start an ad campaign and how to follow up.

It focuses mostly in Google adwords since it is the most widespread advertising agency on the web. Author refers also to some third party tools for keyword searching, bidding and statistics.

Finally, I felt confortable with book's chapters regarding their order and division.

Even to one with only rudimentary knowledge of the internet, it is obvious that there is a gold-mine out there. I imagine billions of customers clamoring for the opportunity to buy what I want to sell--All I have to do is show them where it is and how to buy it. It sounds so easy.

So easy that I quickly went through several thousand dollars and was still no farther ahead than I was when I started. Well, that's not exactly true. I have several festering sores from having been gouged by people who wanted only to help me, and, of course, get nice large chunks of money for that help. But I continued searching for the way to let all of those buyers get to my products.

When I found Heather Lutze's book, "The Findability Formula", it was like having somebody shine a spotlight on the answers to the questions that I didn't even know I'd needed to ask.

Lutze cuts to the chase with her clear, concise instructions, and great resource lists for finding solutions to those questions I didn't know to ask. Happily I am now better informed than many of the "helpers" who held themselves forth as experts.

Although I am yet in the beginning of this new business of internet sales, I know "The Findability Formula" will always be at hand as a quick and easy reference.

This is not simply a book touting "Pay Per Click" word purchasing, but it emphasizes the need for carefully selected "Key-words" to lead customers to the website. Key-words plus well coordinated advertising campaigns using many of the resources Lutze suggests.
Thank you Heather Lutze.
Bob

This book is a wonderful resource that is down-to-earth and readable. Easy to understand explanations and great examples. We're working our way thru the processes described in this book for keywords, landing page design and pay-per-click and have developed a crystal clear understanding of what we're doing and seeing clear results as well. Throw away all those dense books written by the engineers and stick to this one!

It doesn't matter if you're a beginner or an expert: if you want to know how to maximize results and minimize costs from pay-per-click marketing, you've got to read this book.
We've been in the PPC game for eight years and we immediately found ways to cut our costs and improve our response rate using the ideas in Heather's book. Heather's insights about how to use the "long tail" of keywords and negative keywords were especially useful.
[...]

David Ogilvy wrote "Confessions of an Advertising Man" and rocked Madison Avenue. He gave away his trade secrets! He told people how he came up with his campaigns! He showed them how to do it! When others questioned his sanity, he replied simply that his customers were not advertisers and they did not want to do it themselves. In effect Ogilvy had published an advertising brochure for his firm.

Many "How To" authors out there write books promising to teach you how to make widgets. The book outlines the steps but when it comes to actually giving away the procedures and the real "how to", we find the author wants us to call his firm for a consultation. Heather Lutze is above this and actually gives readers full and useful information.

She starts by explaining why search engine marketing is different and outline steps to follow in any marketing campaign. She argues for starting with paid searches, and against the popular misconception that novices should start by optimizing their page to show up higher in the free searches. Among other things, paid searches get you feedback data. But before telling you how to do that, she describes marketing strategies.

For instance people go through an average of five search sessions over several days before buying online, so your keywords ought to be those that corresponds what your customers are. If you deliver pizza delivery in a suburb of Montreal, your keywords ought not be only "pizza" and "delivery" but "pizza", "delivery", "cartierville" (the neighborhood), and "livraison" (French!).

Other examples of good advice given in its proper place include making keywords part of the URL, including keywords in the first four lines of the web page copy, aiming for searches to land on the RIGHT page rather than on your top page, writing copy that informs rather sells (i.e. soft selling rather than agressive hard selling).

In the end of course, Heather Lutze makes money from consulting not from selling books, so she wants people to hire her firm to do their internet marketing. It's an honest book and small businesses can indeed use her formula to do their own marketing. Larger firms however are likely to hire professional talent. Like David Ogilvy, Lutze understands that giving away her secrets is an honest way to convince her prospective customers that she knows what she is doing.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo