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

Vanessa Fox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2010

Search has changed everything. Search has become woven into our everyday lives, and permeates offline as well as online activities.

Every business should have a search strategy. How a business appears online can impact consumer influence as much as if not more than offline advertising like TV commercials. A business's search strategy can have a dramatic impact on how consumers interact with that business.

But even more importantly, search engine activity provides amazingly useful data about customer behavior, needs, and motivations. Accessing search data is like conducting focus groups with millions of people for free. Search isn't just for marketers and techies. It can provide valuable insight on business strategy and product strategy.

Companies of all sizes – from startups to global enterprise level corporations, and even businesses without web sites – can benefit from understanding how consumers are searching for them and talking about them online, both as a powerful acquisition channel and a vast repository of market research.

In this non-technical book forexecutives, business owners, marketers, and product managers, search engine strategy guru Vanessa Fox-who created Google's portal for site owners, Googgle Webmaster Central -explains what every marketer or business owner needs to understand about how search rankings work, how to use search to better understand your customers and attract new ones, how to develop a comprehensive search strategy for your business, and how to build execution of this strategy into the businesses processes. This isn't another book about paid search for advertisers. This book focuses on organic listings – the unpaid results that receive 86% of searcher clicks.

• Written by search engine guru Vanessa Fox, formerly Google's search engine strategy spokesperson and creator of Google Webmaster Central
• Explains from a businessperson's perspective how to develop a successful search engine strategy
• Shows how to use the easily accessible data from search engines to increase qualified traffic, better understand customers, and strengthen customer relationships
• Reveals how smaller companies can leverage search engine marketing to achieve parity with larger brands

With this book in hand, every businessperson will have the knowledge and the tools to maximize the potential of search engine marketing to build a brand, draw new prospects, and generate sales.

Editorial Reviews

Review

‘Her passion shines through when explaining how smaller firms can gain huge benefits…this book is a winner.' (Growing Business, September 2010).

From the Inside Flap

In the age of Google, your customers are searching.

Will they find you?

In today's searching world, customers turn to online search engines first. Yet many companies simply don't realize acquiring customers from search engines should be a core business strategy. Instead, they usually focus on narrow goals, such as boosting page rankings. These oversights leave a huge channel for engaging with potential customers largely untapped. Businesses that use data about how people search to inform their product strategy will reach customers before the competition. Businesses that understand the importance of non-ad-based search acquisition will make it central to their marketing mix, and can connect with high-quality customers for long-term growth and success.

Marketing in the Age of Google is a practical guide to harnessing the full power of online search for your business. Written by former Google employee Vanessa Fox, who created Google's official portal for explaining online search to businesses, this clear, non-technical book demystifies search marketing and explains proven methods you can implement at your business today.

Not another book on AdWords campaigns, Marketing in the Age of Google instead focuses on making your business stand out in the "organic" searches that attract 86 percent of user clicks. Fox shows you where companies get hung up with rankings, and lays out a comprehensive approach for achieving the search goal that matters most: connecting with the people who want to find you.

You'll also discover how to:

• Integrate search strategy into all aspects of your business
• Cut through the data and get the actionable metrics you need
• Use data about what people are searching for as a valuable market research tool
• Get your company found through social media
• And more!

Whether you're a sole proprietor or you work for a major global brand, Marketing in the Age of Google will help you fully integrate search into your business and marketing activities—and give you a major advantage over competitors.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (May 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470537191
• ISBN-13: 978-0470537190
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #98 in Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > E-commerce > Internet Marketing

More About the Author

Vanessa Fox, called a "cyberspace visionary" by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She's also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at SearchEngineLand.com, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours, available for download on iTunes. She previously created Google's Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was recently named one of Seattle's 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Material and Structure -, June 21, 2010

By 

Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy (Hardcover)

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.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good material despite some flaws, September 8, 2010

By 

A. Mann "gadget maven" (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy (Hardcover)

Although overall a book with a lot of tips, the author does not explain things as well as she could. For instant, she starts talking about Google Trends and doesn't tell us where to find it online (I guess there's Google for that ;). That said, there are a lot of good gems she shares. Here are some:

-Searchers click on organic results 85% of the time

-Companies connect with searches in two ways: Paid and Organic

-Longer search queries = fewer paid results appearing to the searcher

-Videos and images draw users away from the paid search column

-50% of searchers will see the 7th search result

-100% of searchers look at the first organic result; 50% look at the first paid result

-Increased organic results = increased brand awareness

-organic results last over time, whereas paid results stop the second you stop paying for them

-Searchers click on a brand 92% of the time when a brand is in both paid and organic results

-A search is on avg. three words long; nearly 25% are only one word

-Women are more deliberate in reading search results

-A #1 ranking is less important than people think. If you rank in the top 3 to 4 results and have a more compelling title and description, you may own the click

-Searchers don't even look at the entire title. They look at the left half of it

-Remember that every page of your site is a potential entry for visitors

-The days of normal search results that everyone sees the same are now over

-YouTube is the second largest search engine

-Results that contain both video and images, searches start with that first, then go above, and then below in their scan

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great snapshot of online marketing, today., May 19, 2010

By 

Marshall (Denver, CO, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy (Hardcover)

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.