I recently finished a book called Marketing in the Age of Google (2010), written by a former Google employee, Vanessa Fox. What I want to do is give you a bit of my perspective on this book as an SEO’er, and let you know if it is worth your time to read it as a business owner. I will address a few of the main points Fox explores in the book and then give you some of my own ideas.
I originally found this book by doing a search on Amazon.com for SEO books. I was fairly new in the SEO industry, and was wanting to find resources that could help me better understand how SEO worked. I had yet to see if SEO really was something that would interest me as a career, and I hoped this book would help me decide.
Fox, as I said earlier, worked for Google and was instrumental in building Google Webmaster Central. She spoke with thousands of different companies during her time there, and helped them understand how to implement a business strategy in the age of search engines. She states, “To [business owners], Google was somewhat of a black box. They knew that organic search (the unpaid result set) was important, but they had no idea how to use search data and customer acquisition from organic search in their business processes” (Fox, XIII).
She set out to write a book that would be a resource for business owners to be able to alter their business plans. Also taking into account new businesses, she wrote to help businesses add internet search as a main factor in how to gain new customers. She begins by talking about the history of the internet, and why search engines were built, giving any business owner a set foundation of how the internet works. She then progresses into how you can build your site and content in a way that will reach your target market and customer base. It is all very simply explained and gives you confidence that you can simply and effectively optimize your website.
The thing I appreciated the most about this book looking at it as a business owner/new SEO’er was Fox’s voice. Her use of terminology and jargon is easy to understand, and is not riddled with confusing terms and theories that just confuse more than they help. Fox is very good at taking things in a constant pace that excites you and motivates you to move on to the next step.
I was rather impressed with this book and would highly recommend it to any business owner who is wanting to know how to expand their business online, or even start online. With the way our economy is moving, people are searching more and more online to find products and services. Marketing in the Age of Google is a great road map for you as a business owner to understand how to create an online presence, and have a company such as Boostability help you to accomplish your goals.
If you are interested in the book, check it out on Amazon
