Despite slowly become more prominent, I still believe most businesses are missing out on structured data opportunities such as Google Authorship.
Google Authorship allows you to show a thumbnail photo next to your listing in the search results, making it stand out from your competitors.
Here are three reasons why you should be using Google Authorship:
Increased Click-Through Rate (CTR)
For now at least, the fact that there are not many people who have implemented Google Authorship, makes you’re listing in the search results stand out more than the others and naturally eyes are drawn to it. Research by Search Director at Catalyst Online found, rich snippets increased click through rate by 150%, not bad at all.
Personal Branding
If you are looking to build yourself as an authority in your niche, this presents a great way for you to do that. If I am researching a particular subject on SEO and I come across a piece written by Danny Sullivan, I automatically click on that link because I am familiar with Danny Sullivan, regardless of whether it is not the first or second position in the search results.
This provides a great opportunity to build your personal brand, but remember the same can work the other way, if I dislike your content, chances are I might avoid your listings in the search results.
Make sure you are presenting great content!
Author Rank
Now this one is more of a bonus, since it is only speculation at the moment, but there is strong indication that your authorship data could be used as a ranking signal. This quote by Google chairman, Eric Schmidt has certainly caused a stir on the subject:
“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
This quote has been open to interpretation and continues to be debated. What essentially it could mean is Google could rank certain authors higher for certain search queries by determining their relevance to it.
For example, Danny Sullivan may rank high on anything closely related to SEO, however he wouldn’t rank so high if he started writing about DIY.
Put this way, if it Google does start using authorship data as a ranking signal, you would already be ahead of your competitors who have not implemented Google Authorship.
How to implement Google Authorship
There are a few ways to implement Google Authorship on your website. The simplest method is to have an author profile page which all your individual posts are linked to.
In the head section of the author profile page you need to include the author tag as follows:
<link rel=”author” href=”Insert Google Plus Profile URL Here”/>
Then the author need to go to the ‘About’ section of their profile and add the domain of the website in the ‘Contributor to’ section using ‘Add custom link’.
WordPress websites
If you are running your website on a hosted version of WordPress, I would highly recommend WordPress SEO plugin, which is not only awesome for SEO but also does most of the Google Authorship coding for you.
The plugin adds a Google Plus field in the user section in the WordPress Admin, allowing you to simply insert the author’s Google Plus URL in there.
The author still has to then add the domain in the ‘Contributor to’ section of their Google Plus profile, like before.
These are the most common ways to add the authorship mark-up, you can read more information on the Google website here.
Testing
You can ensure you have implemented mark-up correctly using the Structured Data Testing Tool. This will show you what the listing will look like in the search results.
What next?
It is important to test that Google Authorship with your own website, analyse the impact it has on your own traffic.
Go one step further, Cyrus Shepard managed to increase his click-through rate by 35% through optimising his author photo, try different photos and figure out achieves the highest CTR.
Google Authorship is just one structured data type that Google uses in its search results, there are many others you could use including recipes, reviews, events and more. Implement some of these and test the impact.
Notes
- Google does not have to show your author photo in their search results, however I have come across very few cases where this has occurred.
- Don’t try and include Authorship on every page such as ecommerce pages and the home page, Google does not like this. Only use this for content pages which have been authored.
