Customer Reviews

Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales

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Catherine Seda's excellent book "Search Engine Advertising" is the perfect complement to Shari Thurow's "Search Engine Visibility" from which includes an excerpt toward the end. Where Thurow's book, the best one in terms of accomplishing high rankins in 'organic' (read unpaid) search results, Seda's book brings along the whole other side of the equation: that of paid options to accomplish high rankings. In doing so, one of her key points is that Search Engine Advertising doesn't end when the customer arrives at your site (visits), but it really is about conversions (getting the customer to make a purchase, subscribe or whatever your web site's purpose is when s/he arrives to it).

The book is very well structured around six parts:
i) Planning: the key (yet sometimes overlooked) part of the process, to ensure you know who you are targetting and how, before jumping into the paid options.
ii) Paid Placement Programs: she presents the differences (pros and cons) of the most important fixed placement and pay-for-placement programs available.
iii) Paid Inclusion Programs: directories are presented here in all their splendor, along with what you can do to enhance your possibilities before submitting your site, and how to manage a large number of simultaneous submissions. Web site optimization is touched upon briefly at this point, but in no way substituting Thurow's book on the topic: you simply have to have both, if you're serious about Online Marketing at all.

iv) Specialized Search Engines: comparison shopping engines, vertical market search engines and international search engines are discussed in some detail, to get you started with them.
v) Tracking ROI: normally just as overlooked as the planning stage, the tracking of the results of paid advertising campaigns are discussed in extensive detail to ensure that you are able to steer the boat in the right direction if your ROI data shows that you're putting money on the wrong key terms, your copy is not doing what it should to engage customers, or your landing pages are not taking customers where you want them to go once they get to your site.
vi) Protecting profits: topics such as click fraud, trademark infringement and affilate networks are discussed, as things to keep an eye on.

All in all, this is not a book you'd want to sit down and read in one afternoon (nor would you be able to). This is a hands-on book to work through and use as a reference as you're getting your feet wet with this whole other animal that is paid advertising on the Web. It has done a ton for me in the two months I've been applying the concepts contained in it, since it summarizes very well all the options available to you, their pros/cons and how to best take advantage of them, considering your size and budget. I highly recommend it without reserves for eMarketers that have not had too much exposure to paid options, as well as those who have some experience in the area, since it provides a wealth of tips and insights that most people in the field can benefit from.

Disclosure: I received a copy for review from the publisher.

Catherine primarily focuses this book on the paid side of search engine marketing. I am a search engine marketer and have generally worked on the "free" or optimization side of search engine marketing for the past year. I also have read at least a dozen books or ebooks on this subject.

Generally I think the return on the optimization side is much greater than on the paid side, but if you are a savy marketer using paid search engine marketing can bring rapid distributions and returns. I personally have been amazed at some of the high profile, high frequency search words which have few competitors on the market (even today.)

There is much to know about search engine marketing, and much of the info that is out there on either side (paid or optimization) is chuck full of misinformation. This book is new and kept general enough (covering a rapidly changing environment) to where there is not a bunch of misinformation. She even predicted that paid inclusion would go to a PPC model right before Yahoo! put the new system in place.

If you have enough money to be participating in paid search then this book could help you save some of it.

I'm sure this book was cutting edge when it was first published in February of 2004, but now it's for the most part outdated. For the absolute beginner to this area, there are some good general points, but references to long-since defunct or consolidated web companies (Urchin, Inktomi,etc) make it difficult to understand just what's still relevant. Google and Yahoo (and soon Microsoft) are defining the new landscape of this field as we speak...Try the new book from IBM press, "Search Engine Marketing"....chock full of the latest (as late as can be in this field) info.

There are probably only two ways to grow an online business:
1) Attract more visitors to you site
2) As soon as they are there convert them into customers.
Despite the title of the book Catherine Seda covers both concepts in great detail for the novice and the pro alike.
I bought the book because I wanted to promote my company's site. Applying the concepts has paid great dividends for my business.
Whether you want to run/are running Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns on Google Adwords and Overture, optimize organic search, promote a new or old site, or even choose a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agency this book is outstanding.
Throughout it has a clear focus on Return on Investment (ROI)
Amidst the sea of half-truth, urban legends, fairy tales and unprofessional SEO, this book stands apart.
I just hope, my competitors will never read it!

Catherine's book completely transformed the way one of my clients advertised and marketed its business. In fact, 85% of all of its business now, other than word-of-mouth is a direct result of her excellent book.

For years a family member of mine (my sister) and the owner of a low tech service business (a cage-free dog grooming, boarding, and training facility) had been putting its advertising dollars into expensive display ads in a local pet paper that has a very limited distribution to mostly pet shops around Los Angeles, CA.

My sister was spending a small monthly fortune on these ads with no apparent leads even coming from the ads.

She had a very limited understanding of computers and the web and did no Pay Per Click advertising at all and also had a very poor ranking in the natural search results for her company's super basic web site.

The person who helped transform my sister's dog business and succeed on the web was me; her brother, a career changer who ended up in the Search Engine Marketing world and started reading everything I could about it as a new work direction for myself. And frankly, I read pretty much every book that has ever been written about this exciting field (plus hundreds of web pages!), to educate myself for my new career.

Enter Catherine's book, it's been a win for my sister, and a win for me.

I found Catherine's book right here on Amazon just like you who is reading this review, the "best of them all."

Now I am back to post my own review and let people know that if you require a terrific book that is written clearly and concisely, never talks down to the "newbie" (like I was), and helps you understand all the ins and outs of Search Engine Marketing, this book is it and it will be money well spent.

Others who have reviewed her book here have touched on several aspect of the book which they found excellent and I agree with them all.

My take on Catherine's book is it is full of "great" and proven revenue-generating ideas (just ask my sister). I especially found her PPC copywriting and bidding tips especially helpful.

If you truly want to understand the ins and outs of Pay Per Click, then click on that buy button now, you'll be very pleased you did.

This book does it. Whether it is me needing a refresher or if I am trying to make marketing partners "get it", Catherine covers it all. I can hand this book to a marketing director or VP and they can read it and understand what I have preached for some time. Catherine's incredible knowledge of the industry not only brings it home, it brings it to their level of understanding.

This book is fairly well-written, but ultimately, it's frustrating because it doesn't tell the reader how to deal with specific search engine ad programs. Instead, Catherine Seda talks about categories of search engine advertising like "Fixed Placement," "Pay for Placement," "Submit URL," and "Trusted Feed." I keep reading these categories and wondering, "Is the model she's referring to here like Google? If so, how is Google different? How do all these programs rate for popularity, bang for the buck, etc.?" I guess Ms. Seda avoided these specifics so that her book didn't look outdated too quickly. I'd rather have a book that was extremely valuable at one point than one that tries to dance around the specific facts I'm craving.

It's not a bad overview of Search Engine Marketing, but I wouldn't recommend stopping with this read.

Some of the things Catherine covers are good and don't change. As an example, the chapters that provide Copyrighting Tips and that talk about how to improve conversions on Landing Pages. Even though they are only providing a glimpse as to what you need to know, many of those things do not change from year to year.

Other things however are going to require the reader further study. What one needs to focus on today to get good rankings is quite different from the day this book was written.

An example is paid inclusion; someone reading this should know that you don't need to pay to get indexed now. Sitemaps, getting backlinks from ranked sites that get regularly crawled, directories, blogs etc..

But it's good to absorb whatever one can. Even if someone comes away with a few ideas they didn't have before to improve their bottom line, it's worth the small price of this book.

All the things you need to know to maximize your pay per click ad campaigns in one book! This book is amazing - I read it in one night and implemented the changes immediately. The result? We saw our profits increase, our click through rates almost double, and we made an additional $5,000 the first month we implemented the changes the author suggested.

I wish I would have found this book when I first started our e-commerce website - I would have saved thousands of dollars.

This author is an expert in the field and knows what she is talking about -- thanks Catherine!

I bought this book to improve my website position and to learn more about online advertising. This book is clear and concise and presents the information in a way that is easily understandable for the novice without all the advertising lingo.