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Google AdWords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson - Book Review
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Google AdWords for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2009), ISBN 978-0-470-45577-7) by Howie Jacobson, Ph.D., is an excellent introduction to Google AdWords. AdWords, of course, is Google's advertising platform and Jacobson does a great (and fun) job leading you through the steps of creating an ad campaign to optimizing it to monitoring it. What is missing from the book, however, is a discussion of how to strategically combine an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy and an AdWords strategy. In this blog post, I discuss making your SEO and AdWords work together in the context of Jacobson's book.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: February 5, 2010
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Contents:
AdWords by Howie 
AdWords for Dummies is a good book. In fact, it is really a great book in comparison with most of the books available on SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Perhaps this is because Jacobson is super smart, perhaps it is because AdWords is a defined topic vs. SEO (which is very broad and messy) - I'm not sure. But it is a very well done book, one that leads you step by step through the process of setting up and managing an AdWords campaign from start to finish.
In terms of the basic set up, Jacobson emphasizes creating a one-to-one correlation between your keywords and Ad Groups. Google rewards ads that tightly fit a keyword family - the ad repeats the target keyword, the keywords are closely related, and the 'landing page' is keyword centric. He points out that your landing page, in particular, should repeat your target keyword - not just for Google but also for your real customers. A customer that wants to find a 'reverse mortgage broker in San Jose' is going to be more likely to click through on an ad that repeats those keywords, and lands on a page that confirms his search for 'reverse mortgage San Jose.'
Beyond the basics, Jacobson makes some very good points about split / testing. One of the great things on Google is to run multiple ads for the same keyword and then use Google to split test whether ad 'A' is better than ad 'B' in terms of clicks and/or conversions. Jacobson guides you through this process, and points out that letting Google do this automatically is inferior to manually comparing the course of two ads.
Finally, Jacobson returns to marketing at the end of the book and emphasizes the value of email in particular. Let your website build an email list, he says, and you can actually lessen your dependence on Google. AdWords and your website becomes ways to begin a conversation with your customers, and not ends in themselves. For this, I greatly respect him and this book as it is not your usual self-serving AdWords love fest. Jacobson clearly loves AdWords, but he positions it as a means to an end and not an end in itself.
AdWords vs. SEO? AdWords and SEO?If the book has a flaw, it is at the conceptual level of where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ends and AdWords (advertising) should begin. Nowhere in the book does he discuss one of the most fundamental issues in our relationship with Google: what can we get for 'free,' and what is worth 'paying for?' If, for example, a Medical Malpractice Attorney in San Francisco can get to Page 1 Position 2 for 'free' using SEO, should he pay for AdWords vis-a-vis that keyword? Alternatively, how much effort and budget should a company devote to their SEO strategy vs. their AdWords advertising? As many companies have learned, Google is more than happy to take all of their money for AdWords without giving them any assistance on how to blend the free SEO efforts with the paid advertising ones.
If it is AdWords vs. SEO, therefore, Jacobson provides you with little guidance as to how to go about getting to the top of Google for free, and once there, how to devote your AdWords resources to other keywords or keyphrases that are more problematic for your company. The simplest system is:
- If your company is showing up on Page 1 for a given keyword, then do NOT pay to advertise!
Beyond that simple system, of course, there are many more complex strategies blending AdWords and SEO. Many companies rightly believe, for example, that seeing the repetition of an ad can increase the response for the SEO portion and vice-versa. Others recognize that for some very commercial searches (such as 'Digital Camera'), consumers may look primarily at the ads first and ignore the SEO results. In other words, more complex strategies are available than simply 'AdWords vs. SEO.' You can have an 'AdWords and SEO' strategy if you just understand them both.
Unfortunately, on that issue, however, Google is moot and so is Jacobson. So this one critical flaw exists in AdWords for Dummies. Reading most SEO books won't help either: they just focus on the opposite side of the coin, without reflecting on how the 'heads' of AdWords and the 'tails' of SEO are soldered together with ties of metal.
SEO Book Rank Checker: the Missing AdWords ToolIf Jacobson or other authors involved in the SEO or AdWords industry cared to look, they might boldly point out the biggest flaw of all in the Google Analytics and AdWords system: the lack of any systematic tools to measure your Google rank across your keywords. This is a flaw so obvious that one has to wonder whether it is by design that Google does not allow you to measure your rank vs. a specific keywords in Analytics and/or to input that data into Google AdWords. Would it not be fantastic to be able to program into AdWords this logic -
- IF my company domain is appearing in rank < 10 for keyword = 'n' then do not show my AdWords ad. IF my company domain is not appearing in rank < 10 for keyword ='n' then do show my ad.
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The AdWords user is left to his own devices to implement this sort of metrics and AdWords strategy. The best tool on the market to do is is SEO Book's Rank Checker available for free at seobook.com. I recommend to all our students and clients that they set up the same keywords in Rank Checker that they are using in AdWords and then coordinate their free SEO and paid AdWords strategies accordingly.
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