Google Search
Unless your commitment to paper and ink is so firm that you still use a phonebook, you probably use Google Search every week. As the world’s online Rolodex, Google handles 60 percent of the world’s search traffic. The Google search engine is so accurate and fast that it obviates the need to bookmark any website. Key in a common search, and the first result is often what you seek.
Google Search has powerful operators that make the service even more useful:
- Quote a phrase like this: “book packager,” which is more likely to return service companies than cardboard boxes.
- Find all instances of a word or phrase on one specific website like this: “ “My Book Title” site:nytimes.com.”
- But Google’s real usefulness is in its value-added features—the parsing of all those correct searches and their delivery to you.
Google Alerts
Instead of going to the news, let the news come to you. A well-tuned suite of Google Alerts can be like a news website that is custom-made to deliver only the news that interests you. Google Alerts allows you to create a continuous search that will periodically report on its results. Instead of visiting google.com once a week to sift through all the search results for new information on Lance Armstrong, I can create a Google Alert that will search 24-7 for new search results on Lance Armstrong. Alerts will send me an e-mail as soon as it finds a new search result, once a day, or once a week. For those of us with clogged inboxes, Google Alerts are also deliverable via an RSS feed.
How Publicists Can Use Google Alerts. Google Alerts streamlines the task of tracking online publicity hits with continuous searches for a book title or author name. It’s best to quote a phrase for more relevant results. With Alerts, you can discover new websites or bloggers that might be willing to review future books.
How Editors Can Use Google Alerts. Find new authors using topical Alerts. Say you acquire books on birding and you’re looking for an author to write about birds in Maine. You could create a Google Alert for “birding in Maine” to see who shows up in the results over a period of time. As you become familiar with the landscape, you could further hone your Alert keywords. An author in hand is worth…
How Production Can Use Google Alerts. Using a keyword search, such as “print-on-demand” or “ebook xml,” production editors can follow trends and new developments.
Blogger
Until recently, publishing has been a one-way dialogue, but publishers and authors can learn a lot from their readers. Create a community using Blogger. Blogger is Google’s free blogging service. Within two minutes, you can register, pick a visual design, and begin blogging with text, photos, video, and more. Authors can tag each blog post with topical keywords. Blog readers can leave comments, beginning a dialogue with authors. Readers can subscribe to the blog using its built-in RSS feeds or via e-mail. In fact, with some design know-how, a publisher could created a full-featured website and online catalog using nothing more than Blogger.
How Publicists Use Blogger. Raise an author’s online profile and create a community around an author or book. Since Blogger is part of Google, blog posts that link to outside websites will quickly raise the blogger’s ranking in search engine results. The most popular blogs on the web treat blog posts as conversation starters.
Google Search-based Keyword Tool
Everyone wants to know how to get more website traffic from online searches. The answer, “search engine optimization,” sounds technical and fancy, but Google has a strong self-interest in making your website relevant to its users. Google provides the Search-based Keyword Tool to help make websites more relevant.
Here’s how it works:
- Plug your website URL into the Search-based Keyword Tool.
- It scans your website, noting keyword phrases.
- It compares your keywords against searches by actual Google search users.
- It suggests keywords you should use on your website to capture more traffic from future Google searches.
Google Ad Planner
This is undoubtedly one of the more powerful services Google offers because it gives users a glimpse into web traffic statistics for a huge number of websites.
How Marketers and Publicists Can Use Ad Planner. Discover websites that your potential customers are visiting. Use Google’s default audiences (“Baby Boomers,” “Culinary Aficionados,” etc.) or set custom geographic (country, state, city) and demographic (age, household income, gender, etc.) criteria to find the websites that audience is already frequenting. If those websites are part of Google’s vast ad network, you can launch an AdWords campaign directed at a specific group of websites and their underlying demographic. Marketers can build campaigns around keywords or target websites, too. This is an unbelievably powerful tool.
Discover difficult-to-obtain web traffic statistics for most websites. Since Google provides the majority of web searches, captures traffic data via Google Analytics (see below), and collects ad-serving data via its AdWords network, it is in the unique position to make educated guesses about the extent of web traffic for any given website. For example, Google Ad Planner tells us that 21 million unique visitors visit nytimes.com each month, viewing 880 million pages of the site. In my experience, Ad Planner underestimates web traffic, but it offers both a ballpark and a pecking order. These data help publicists determine which websites, and for the first time bloggers, are most influential to their publicity campaigns.
Google Analytics
How well do you know your own website? Google Analytics can bring to light critical data about who is visiting your website, what they read, and how they got there.
How Marketers Can Use Google Analytics. There are books on this topic. Put simply, tell Google Analytics what websites you want to track and it will give you a piece of code to insert into your website. That code tracks your website’s traffic, offering you a wealth of data.
The key data are these:
- Visits: number of visits to your website in a given time period
- Pageviews: number of pages those visitors saw
- Absolute unique visitors: number of individual computers that visited your website (approximates individual people)
- Direct traffic: number of visits from people typing in your URL or using a bookmark to your URL (approximates the loyalty of your visitors)
- Referring sites: number of visits from sites that link to yours (These data are particularly useful for publicists to discover the influence of online publicity or specific websites)
- Keywords: the words a user typed into a search engine that led them to your website
A Quick Case Study in Googling
One of our authors is named “Jamie Smith.” He has a common name and his book with us was his first. Jamie is a bike racer and bike race announcer, but he had no “platform” at all. In fact, he was invisible to Google—you couldn’t find the right “Jamie Smith” in the first five pages of results.
So I set him up with Blogger. I bought him two domain names, ridersready.net for his blog and thatsbikeracing.com for his, um, bibliographic information. I filled each site’s metadescription with good keywords to make them more relevant to Google Search. I linked both sites to each other and to velopress.com, which raised their Google PageRank. Next, I hooked Jamie’s blog feed into AmazonConnect (now Author Central), juicing his PageRank even more. I “burned” his blog feed using FeedBurner, which gave his blog better search engine visibility and more ways for readers to subscribe to his posts. Before launching his book’s press release into the wild, I made sure to list both websites in the “About Jamie” section in the hope that websites and bloggers would link to them, which would raise their PageRank. I blogged about Jamie’s new book on the VeloPress blog, linking to both sites and boosting that PageRank even more. I installed separate Analytics tracking codes into his blog html and his biographical site, shelled out a few hundred bucks for a little online advertising to help get Jamie’s blog off the ground, and watched the web traffic roll in. Today, my “Jamie Smith” is the third Google result and “Jamie Smith Roadie” is the entire first page of Google results. Take that, other Jamie Smiths! Oh, and over 13,000 people have visited Jamie’s blog.
And all this is free, courtesy of Google! All you need to get started is a little time and a username (or four).
Dave Trendler is Marketing and Publicity Manager at VeloPress. He has somewhat accidentally accumulated at least four Google accounts while using Ad Planner, AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, Blogger, Book Search, Calendar, Chrome, Custom Search, Desktop, Docs, Earth, FeedBurner, Gmail, Goog-411, iGoogle, Image Search, Keyword Tool, Maps, News, Picasa, Profiles, Reader, Search-based Keyword Tool, Toolbar, Trends, Voice, Webmaster Tools, YouTube, and his most recent addition—a Google Wave account.
This article appeared in the PubWest EndSheet No. Two during summer, 2009.
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