Thus far, SEO has the greatest effect on lead generation apart from paid ads, and an effective marketing strategy can’t run to its maximum potential without the inclusion of SEO. What’s unique about this marketing technique is that it has to work intimately with all other aspects of digital marketing such as content marketing, social media, Facebook ads, Google AdWords and others.
Most guide books deal with only the sole aspect of SEO, but there are also many good b0oks that let you know how SEO works together with your entire digital marketing plan. Below are some books that we feel you will benefit from; some just touches on SEO, some on SEO components such as content marketing and social media, and some are hybrids of the former two – we are pleased to present you with 30 books that every SEO business should read here. If you find this list useful, feel free to share it!
One of the must-read in the SEO industry for any SEO business, this book talks about the search engine basics and their history. It also tells you how search engines look at content, and when they properly index your content. There are also good details on keyword research, SEO-friendly website development, content marketing and social media and how it all relates to SEO. Check it out here.
This is a great book for anyone starting to learn SEO. Sure, lots of information are available all over the Internet for SEO but nothing beats having it all consolidated in one book for you to digest slowly by yourself.
Written by Dr. Jason McDonald, ’50 SEO Ideas’ is considered one of the most powerful books for beginners of SEO or any SEO business, because he wrote it in an easy-to-understand and implement way that new readers can easily understand SEO and its role in the marketing eco-space.
This is not an idea book but a book of ideas, said the writer, because it is meant to spur your own thinking and opinions on SEO and marketing and not a book of hard facts for you to digest and forget about it. Its price is amazingly reasonable for the content and Dr McDonald also have other SEO books such as ‘SEO Fitness Workbook 2018‘ and ‘Social Media Marketing Workbook 2018‘.
Said to be one of the best books on SEO or search engine optimization for beginners and experts, the SEO Fitness Workbook by Jason McDonald covers web optimization (onpage and offpage SEO), how to get inbound links, blog mentions and social authority links, step-by-step guide on how to use videos to rank for SEO, measuring via metrics your SEO efforts, plus hundreds of free tools that you can use for your SEO methods. There are also worksheets that bring you through the entire SEO process.
Finally, there is also a detailed section about local SEO for local businesses as well as one on Google Analytics.
In this book, Bruce Clay shares with you everything you need to know about SEO and more, such as how search engines work, how to apply effective keyword and linking strategies, content marketing, web design, what are the ways to use SEO to position yourself competitively, the latest on international SEO practices, and more.
This is probably one of the best books you can read if you want to know more about what your SEO employees or vendors are doing or if they are really doing whitehat SEO. A classic addition to the library of any credible SEO business.
Designed to give readers a practical approach to integrating search and social media optimization, businesses that read this book will benefit from its practical planning and creative content marketing tactics that have been proven to increase digital results.
In essence, it provides insights on how to create a blueprint for search, social media and content marketing strategy and also map out guidelines and processes for you to scale your business effectively.
Finally, this book provides an approach for a marketing strategy that combines the best of search, content, social media marketing and SEO methods.
SE0 2018: Learn Search Engine Optimization with Smart Internet Marketing Strategies book will take you through the SEO techniques used by millions of companies worldwide, detailing the exact steps they used to rank well on Google.
This is the most updated copy of Adam Clarke’s SEO book, covering updates to Google’s algorithm and how to use them to your advantage. It also shows potential changes that will happen in 2018.
A very popular book on Amazon, every SEO business would be able to learn SEO from scratch and generate good pagerank on Google, discover how to use powerful link building techniques and get new leads for their clients. You will also be able to know how to research for revenue-generating keywords that will entice customers to your sites.
This concise SEO guide, which covers only 55 pages, is one for beginners, and one that incorporates a comic approach of how SEO actually works, making it fun for everyone to read.
This book gets to the important points of SEO right away and explains each topic in a simple way, with the cartoons littered around the book acting to help you further understand the content.
Highly recommended for complete newbies and every new SEO business and best of all, there’s an SEO checklist right at the end for you to refer to during the course of your work.
Finally, if you have ever wondered why some websites are able to rank better than others, you definitely must read this book.
One of the most important aspects of SEO is link building – who links to your site will determine how it ranks on the search engines. In this book, link building guru and pioneer Eric Ward and Garrett French brings you through little-known and the most effective techniques for link building using social media platforms, blogs, partnerships, public relations, articles and more, the various link building tools, case studies, expert interviews and SEO resources.
Plus, he also touches on link opportunity analyses for your niche, how to dive deep into competitor backlinks and relationship building. If you want to learn link building, this is the first book that you must read.
This book, written by John Jantsch (author of the best-selling book ‘Duct Tape Marketing’ and also the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System™) and Phil Singleton, have been endorsed by dozens of SEO and social media experts. In ‘SEO for Growth’, they document what are the exact components that a business needs in order to create an strong online presence nowadays, how to leverage the new rules of SEO to ensure your website gets found online and how to get the attention of your customers who are already looking to make a purchase or acquire specific knowledge – specifically how to use SEO to achieve this objective.
Explaining SEO in a direct and straightforward way, look no more for the best SEO guide out there – this is the only SEO guide that every new SEO business will ever need. There are also 3 bonus ebooks on local SEO, traffic generation and WordPress website optimization for you to download.
A book for SEO beginners or any SEO business, you will get to know everything from what SEO stands for to what is a backlink. In just under an hour, you will be able to know how to quickly optimize your website and articles or blog posts. It also covers the pitfalls of Google penalties, how to use backlinks and social media to rank your sites.
This book does not cover any fancy tricks but simply shows you how to use SEO effectively and within a reasonable budget to achieve your objectives. If you’ve ever wondered why your website is not ranking on the search engines when your competitors’ sites are, then you certainly must read this simple, essential guide.
‘SEO Like I’m 5’ is a beginner’s guide to SEO by digital marketer and SEO trainer Matthew Capala, who have worked with big name companies such as Apple, Smirnoff and Prudential.
Broken into 5 sections he called Content, Code, Credibility, Connections and Cash, it’s a big book with 233 pages but it is written simply with a focus on providing high quality information for SEO newbies who are totally not into the latest marketing terminology.
This book also includes many websites and resources to help readers and your SEO business with SEO, plus dozen of colourful screenshots and cartoons.
SEO 2017 & Beyond documents pure, white hat SEO strategies that are safe and effective. This is important because nowadays, Google is very strict with businesses or SEO agencies that try to manipulate the rankings through aggressive, black hat SEO techniques or spammy link building, causing the websites that they are managing to drop rapidly out of the search engine ranking pages.
This book focuses on strategies that the author personally use to rank his own websites or his clients’ websites including onsite optimization and offpage link building. All white hat methods, you will feel very safe implementing the strategies from this book. In a gist, you will find solid strategies in this book, with great solutions and advice on how to create excellent content and build trust and authority for your business.
‘SEO Made Simple’ is into its 6th edition, and is one of the best selling SEO book for optimizing your website or blog. Revamped to include the strategies required for top search engine rankings, this book is suitable for both the novice SEO business and the expert professional setup.
With 20 over new pages that include tried and tested SEO techniques that take into account the new Google updates and also new elements such as Google My Business, this book also talks about local search, mobile SEO, PR and reputation management and social media. It also reveal to you the step-by-step strategy to rank in the search engines in less than 30 days.
Since its launch, ‘SEO Made Simple’ has sold more than 30,000 copies.
Shane David, a 17-year SEO professional, maps out 39 powerful SEO strategies that you can implement to guarantee top 10 rankings for your website. A very comprehensive collection, the purchase of this book includes free Kindle updates for life.
‘SEO Decoded’ contains no fluff but just simple and effective SEO techniques that you can use to improve your website ranking quickly. It is divided into 8 main sections such as Keyword Research, Onpage SEO & Content Ranking Strategies, User Interaction Ranking Strategies, Advanced Link Building Strategies, E-Commerce Ranking Strategies, Local SEO Ranking Strategies and WordPress Ranking Strategies.
And when you buy this book, you also get a free copy of ‘101 SEO Resources’, which contains a list of all the best SEO tools and resources that professional SEO consultants use for their clients’ websites.
‘SEO 2017: Master Search Engine Optimization’, written by R.L.Adams who is a also writer for some of the most prestigious media platforms online today, including Forbes, Enterpreneur Magazine, Engadget and the Huffington Post, is a comprehensive guide to SEO in 2017 and beyond for your SEO business.
Why should you trust Adams? Because he has built up his own website ‘Wanderlust Worker’ to more than 3,000 visitors per day in the past 2 years, and most of the traffic was acquired in the last 1 year with a more than 1,000 percent spike in traffic. He documents exactly how he achieves top page rankings on the search engines in this excellent book that is suitable for both beginners and experts.
This book also covers the updates to search engines recently, case studies, basic concepts of SEO and also over 200 ranking factors that are used in Google’s current search algorithm.
What is SEO marketing, How to improve your online presence, Why is SEO so important to your business and more questions are asked and answered in this concise SEO book ‘SEO Marketing: Step By Step Beginner Guide for Making Money Online’.
With proven steps and strategies on how to use SEO to improve your business drastically, this book also details the differences between a website and a blog, the use of keywords and the importance of keyword research, how to make money with SEO marketing, the use of social media channels for SEO marketing, common pitfalls that SEO beginners often encounter as well as best practices of SEO.
A highly recommended read for anyone who’s into SEO and digital marketing, or any SEO business who’s serious about bringing their skills to another level.
This book is not an exact focus on SEO, but it touches on a very important element of SEO – the link building and reputation management aspect. Perhaps the fastest way to gather organic backlinks for your websites, this book provides important social media information on how to tackle today’s rapidly changing digital marketing eco-system.
Some topics include how to grow an engage audience on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Linkedin, how to tell a story and get your brand message across to your audience, how to develop the skills needed to turn your social media followers into customers, how to target to very specific groups of people and also how to improve your bottomline with more efficient marketing and cheaper customer acquisition methods.
A very good and informative read for everyone that’s doing digital marketing and every SEO business.
This SEO book is an indispensable one-stop guidebook for mastering SEO to scale business growth. It also includes paid strategies and strategies on how to use research, data analysis and experimentation to build an SEO structure that is suitable for your business.
The author also teaches you SEO essentials and provides real-world case studies of successes and failures. Other content includes keyword goals and research, how to spot search trends, understanding the motivation and creativity behind the SEO mindset, how to use mobile and platform-agnostic strategies for search growth, web development and design of your website for optimal SEO, and also how to analyse and run SEO reports for your own websites or your clients’ websites. All in all, an excellent resource for the SEO battlefield indeed.
An award-winning book that has been translated into 9 languages and is currently used by more than 30 universities worldwide, ‘Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie or Die’ reveals how predictive analytics, or machine learning, works and how it affects everyone in their daily lives.
Besides detailing why prediction is booming and how it reinvents industries such as businesses, governments, law organisations, hospitals and universities nowadays, Eric Siegel provides case studies and the latest techniques on how these institutions are able to predict when or whether their customers or fans are going to ‘click, buy, lie or die’.
In this captivating reference book for every SEO business and practitioner, Eric Siegel reveals answers to questions such as how data is the backbone of effective and lasting search optimization, how does companies like Target knows that you are pregnant, as well as provides his insights into big data.
This book by Anil Maheshwari is useful for understanding the inherent connection between data science and SEO. It offers easy-to-use tactics and fills the need for a concise book on data science, the hot topic now.
With real-world examples at the beginning of every chapter, as well as case study across the chapters as exercises for you, this book is also a solid tool on the major data mining techniques and platforms.
Immensely popular worldwide and used by many universities in the United States and worldwide, ‘Data Analytics Made Accessible 2017’ has 4 new chapters on data analytics.
‘SEO: Marketing Strategies to Dominate the First Page”s main focus is how to rank your website on Google’s first page, get traffic and earn money. It introduces you to the concepts of internet marketing and provides you with guidelines and techniques on how to rank on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
You’ll learn what is SEO and how it works, what is white hat and black hat SEO, differences between social media and content marketing, the top 10 tips for marketing your startup or dominating the first page of search engines, why do you need to have Google Analytics, what is keyword research, how to use SEO for website promotion and what is the difference between pay per click and organic SEO.
This classic book is written by Vanessa Fox, an expert in acquiring customers through organic search and whom Seattle Business Monthly called a “cyberspace visionary”.
Fox writes this book in such a way that it’s catered also for the non-technical readers, explaining in details why every business owners and marketers needs to understand search rankings, search data, comprehensive search strategies and integrating your strategy into your own business processes.
“Marketing in the Age of Google” also touches on how a business’ search strategy can dramatically impact how consumers interact with it and how search engine activities provide excellent details and data about consumer behaviour, needs and motivations. There are also discussions on the changing landscape of the integration of search and social media.
The evolution of search engine optimization, or SEO as we know it, began in 2011 and the next few years saw the release of more and more Google algorithem adjustments such as Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, the newly-refined semantic searches and more. This book talks about the past like this, because without understanding the past, it’s not possible to know what’s coming in the future or understands what’s happening now.
Said to be a great overview of SEO practices, the SEO Black Book provides some of the secrets implemented by the best SEO specialists worldwide, plus an uncover of the differences between onsite and offsite SEO, keyword research and how they integrates in the overall SEO strategy.
Other topics covered include how to purchase aged domains for instant credibility and why certain websites rank higher or lower than others.
Altogether, it’s an insightful read for anyone interested in SEO or any startup in SEO business.
‘The Link Building Book’ touches on one very important aspect of SEO – backlinks and unlike other books or courses, the techniques, processes and methods in this book are actually said to be quite effective in helping a website to rank well.
Styled and written in such a way that it caters to all levels of knowledge and experience, this book also provides case studies from the writer’s own experience.
Moogan, a link building and SEO veteran, touches on the basics to the history of link building, to planning and executing link building campaigns, to a wide variety of techniques to add to your link building bag of tips.
Although this book was written in 2015, you will get the updates when you purchase the license.
One of the most thorough guides on setting great content that I have ever seen, this book is a fusion of the basics of writing and content marketing, making it a great companion to SEO.
‘Everybody Writers’ is also an excellent resource for attracting and retaining customers through amazing online content. There are also insights into the process and strategy of content creation, production and publishing, with step-by-step instructions for you to follow.
The great part is, these instructions can be applied across all of your digital and social media assets as well, from your website, landing pages, articles, email newsletters, promotions, Facebook page, Pinterest, Instagram and so on. This book is probably the only guide you or your SEO business need to read to thrive in this highly competitive digital world.
Everyone in the digital arena should be familiar with Guy Kawasaki, one of the most influential social media marketers around. In this book, Kawasaki covers everything from Twitter to blogging, getting more followers, optimizing your social media profile and more.
Written in a no fluff style, this is the only book that you should read if you are looking to promote your business or product. It contains more than 100 practical tips and insights into the world of social media, from how to start with a broad approach and then work your way to a focused and compelling presence.
As Guy said,”great stuff, no fluff” – this is great book for every SEO business out there.
Styled in an easy-to-read and understand way, this book by Gary Vaynerchuk, New York Times best selling author, provides you with the latest about social media marketing and shares advice on how to connect with customers.
Most companies commit to “jabbing” – patiently engaging with customers to build the relationships that is vital to create a successful social media campaign and then landing the opportunity to bring down their competition or their customer’s resistance to purchase in one blow. Right hooks convert traffic to sales and show results, but sometimes they don’t. Due to a drastic change in social media platforms now, while communication is still key, context matters more than ever, said Vaynerchuk. It’s now no longer about creating good content, but also good content that are perfectly tailored to specific social media platforms.
If you are unfamiliar with content marketing, but you want to learn about it, this is the book for you because it gives you the basics of content marketing, and shows you how to get noticed among all the noise in the digital world now.
Norris also covers content such as how to scale and improve your content, how to help people with your content, how to build relationships with your content, as well as how to build trust and authority in the digital arena.
“Content Machine” outlines a strategy for using content marketing to build a 7 figure business with zero advertising. Norris himself shares about how he grew his WordPress support business from scratch to more than AUD$1 million annual income in 2 years, with only $191.23 spent on ads.
What’s best about this book is also that it provides downloads and frameworks to help the reader with every aspect of content marketing, from idea generation, to writing guidelines, to hiring and scaling a content team.
And finally, we’ve come to the last book and it’s free! Offered as a lead magnet by Search Engine Journal, one of the leading websites on SEO, “SEO 101″is an in-depth guide and tutorial for beginners, put together by some of industry’s top authorities and experts in SEO such as Benj Arriola, Loren Baker, Anna Crowe, Dave Davies, Stoney deGeyter, Danny Goodwin, Tylor Hermanson, Ryan Jones, Jeremy Knauff, Julia McCoy, Brock Murray, Kristine Schachinger and Dan Taylor.
This book defines SEO for every aspiring SEO business and professional and explain how search engine optimization really works now. You will learn the basics of SEO, what is it, why is it important, how people search and what they search for, how long does it usually takes to see results, what are the key ranking factors, and why links, keywords and high quality content are all very important for SEO success.
Some of the books recommended here might not be the latest, but they still contain enough solid information to give you an excellent guide and background to what SEO’s all about and they include actionable steps that you can use to quickly see results in the search engine ranking pages, be it on Google, Yahoo or Bing. Use these steps together with your own marketing plan and see how you can integrate it seamlessly.
If you are interested to read more besides the above recommended books, some recommended ones are ‘Don’ts’ From My Favorite UX Book,”Don’t Make Me Think”, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives and Content Strategy for the Web.
Finally, know that reading each of these SEO books is in itself a self-discovery, but what’s more important is understanding how you can use SEO in your own business and actually see results in the process – that’s the real joy here.
