Book Review: Mike Moran and Bill Hunt

"Search Engine Marketing, Inc." by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt

Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer with 20 years in search technology at IBM. Bill Hunt is CEO of Global Strategies International, an SEO company that develops and implements SEM strategies for Fortune 500 companies.

This 560-page book shows how to develop and carry out search engine marketing (SEM) projects. It covers SEO and PPC, including how to present SEM strategies to upper management, how to work with the various teams in large organizations.

Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. Published late fall, 2005 (5th printing with updates and corrections to be published early 2006) by IBM Press. 560 pages, illustrations, notes, appendix, glossary, index. $50. Available at Amazon, IBM Press (IBMPressBooks.com), and others. Review by Andreas Ramos.

Executive Summary

A professional presentation of the issues in developing and implementing an SEM campaign (incl. SEO and PPC) for large organizations.

The Details

Although SEM is by now one of the major forms of advertising, there are very few authoritative books. The books I'd recommend could easily be carried in a 6th grader's backpack. There's Shari Thurow's Search Engine Visibility, Enquiro's eye tracking study, and of course, our Insider SEO & PPC.

And now there's IBM's book, just shy of 2 pounds. Just the thing to whack down on a conference table to make your point.

You may be wondering, why is IBM writing about SEO and PPC? Isn't SEO something for hackers? With all the attention on Google, very few people know that IBM has perhaps the most sophisticated search tool available. Search technology has been a major issue for large corporations from the beginnings of computering; large corps were the first which had to deal with indexing and searching billions of files.

The IBM book is organized and well-written. It lays out the steps in preparing a proposal for an SEM strategy for a mid-size or large corporation. It includes a chapter on how to prepare and present an SEM proposal to the various layers within a corporation. The web teams can include over 1,000 people. There's the product managers. Honda not only has a manager for each type of car, they also have managers for each version (the Accord LX, the Accord EX, the Accord LX V6, and so on.) They have to understand, accept, and implement the SEM strategy. There's the VP level: VP of marketing, VP sales, and so on. There's the C-level: CEO, CTO, CFO, and so on, who have to understand and promote the corporate-wide implementation. The various versions of the SEM proposals have to be written to each of these levels in the terms they expect so they can make the proper decisions.

Moran and Hunt's book drives home a point that very few SEM books understand: it's the profitability of the project that matters. SEM is profits. Over and over, the book explains the buying cycle and how to calculate ROI and profitability. There are very good chapters on measuring and calculating profitability.

Regrettably, the vast majority of advertisers at Google do not even use conversion tracking. They are completely unaware of how their PPC campaigns are working, and thus can't make informed decisions. They are basically wasting their money. Very few advertisers are using web analytics. Only the largest PPC companies have the technical resources and technical staff to implement analytics for clients. Without conversion tracking and web analytics, those advertisers are basically driving blind, without any information on the effect of their campaigns. Without information, there is no feedback, which means they can't take corrective action to fix something that's broken or increase a campaign that's working.

The IBM book has too much detail for me to write about each chapter. We've been running a PPC agency with several dozen clients for several years, so we have solid hands-on experience in this. As I read the book, I checked off the items: that's correct, that's true, that's right. The book presents SEO and PPC correctly: what's important, what to do, the steps to take. I found only a very few minor items that were unclear; I emailed with the authors and these will be corrected in the next printing. The book doesn't cover web analytics in detail; that's too complex and should be covered in its own book.

The readers who will get the most from this book are directors and VPs of marketing at companies with 50-100+ employees, or sales over $10 million. The book presents SEM, SEO, and PPC objectively, without trying to sell the service.

Another audience for this book is the CEOs and VP of sales for the several dozen large SEO and PPC companies. They can use this to improve their sales material and proposal presentations.

The Bottom Line

If SEM, SEO, or PPC is important to your business, you must buy this book. It'll give you a very solid, professional, expert understanding of these fields.

Insider Blog

"Search Engine Marketing, Inc." by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt

Executive Summary

The Details

The Bottom Line

Knowledge Base