Companies that publish through their blog, who invest in content marketing or use SEO to bring in business, are losing out by not taking advantage of authorship. Authorship is basically Google’s way of allocating content back to the original author. The goal of authorship was to tackle many issues such as duplicate content, copyright issues, and web spam. However, the bigger purpose of authorship was to actually differentiate quality content from mediocre or poor content. By leveraging the Google+ network, users are able to determine the quality of the content through shares, +1s, comments, and more. This affects the popularity of the content, contributes to a site’s search engine rankings and also helps bring in traffic to the publisher.
3 Reasons Why Every Company Should Use Google Authorship
1. It Helps Build Visibility, Presence, and Authority Through Your Content
It’s getting more difficult to get seen out there with all the competition these days. Google’s authorship system will help content that companies create get more views and shares across the web through various ways. This doesn’t mean that creating content alone will result in exposure. The whole point of Google’s system is to reward publishers that create outstanding content through their social network. Companies will have to invest in producing high quality content to benefit from this system.
2. It Helps Build Connections with the Google+ Network
Because authorship is connected to Google+, businesses will be able to leverage the social network. Businesses can use many Google+ features such as Circles and Hangout to connect with their audience and peers. It also will help locate potential partners for content marketing, SEO, joint ventures, and more. Content can also be discovered by industry influencers and can result in a ripple effect.
3. It Will Eventually Contribute to Your Site’s Search Engine Rankings
Along with authorship, Google released an algorithm called AuthorRank. This affects how your content will rank in the search engine results. It will be based on the quality of your content, how many +1s it has received, how much engagement you’re getting, and your Google circle. Companies that are heavily investing in SEO will soon need to adopt authorship in order to compete.
What the Future Holds for Authorship
Eventually, Google authorship will affect how popular a piece of content becomes and be vital to the success of content marketing campaigns. While there isn’t any information on exactly how much it currently affects search rankings, many SEOs predict that it will be a bigger factor. And as users become more familiar with Google’s authorship system, more preference will be placed on content that’s marked with authorship.
How to Set up Authorship for Your Company
To start displaying your authorship information in Google’s results, you need to first create a Google+ profile for each author. Make sure that you take and upload a clear profile photo for each author that will be contributing to your company. This photo will display next to the search result if authorship is set up correctly. Next, you will need to set up an email address with the same domain your content will be published. To help Google allocate content that’s written by you or your team, the name of the author should be mentioned in the byline. You can then visit the link below and submit the email address you will be using.
https://plus.google.com/authorship
Overall, companies should adopt Google+ as soon as possible. It will help increase exposure for their blogs, help their content marketing campaigns, and improve their search engine rankings. Many businesses are already using authorship with great success and there’s no reason why everybody else should not follow suit.