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

Vanessa Fox (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

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 (May 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470537191
• ISBN-13: 978-0470537190
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #17,564 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

  #37 in	Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > E-commerce
  #23 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Business & Culture > Web Marketing

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Want to learn some quick, new SEO tricks? If yes, then this book is NOT for you!, May 29, 2010

By	Tim Martin (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

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

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.

4 of 4 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 (TOP 50 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.

3 of 3 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.