Stand Out In Your Industry As A Thought Leader With Google Authorship #SEO

Hello, hello my SEO comrades! Google Authorship is one of hottest topics we teach here at Search Engine Academy. It’s been around for a couple years now, and is gaining traction. But what I’m noticing as I teach students and work with clients is that there are a lot of business verticals that could benefit from the thought leaders in them incorporating authorship into their content marketing strategy, but who are currently not. First, what is Google Authorship? It’s a initiative by Google to credit original content to the person who wrote it. When someone has implemented it, their picture could show up in search engine results pages (SERPs). If your picture is the only one that is in the results – and since we are naturally drawn to images – your entry stands out. You can get more click throughs (CTR), which could signal to Google to rank that particular piece content higher, since more people clicked on it. OK, now that we have that established, let’s look at some industries by keyword phrases that might represent opportunities for you to leverage this nifty little SEO/content marketing strategy. Let’s type in the keyword phrase “classic car restoration.” This is page 1 of Google SERPs. Hmmmm…nothing! Given the amount of knowledge and information necessary to restore cars, I’d say any enterprising classic car restoration business can stand out by doing some posts about at least the basics, set up their authorship and get some traction in the SERPs. On the other hand, I put in “search engine optimization,” and get this on page 1: A little more crowded, which means really compelling titles and descriptions or rich snippets will be necessary to compete with the other entries. OK, let’s try something fairly technical – “project accounting software” And once again…nothing on page 1. So there’s potential here as well. The point is, plug in some of your keyword phrases and see if anyone shows up on page one. If not, I highly recommend you establish Google Authorship by creating and optimizing your Google Plus profile (required) and stepping through the authorship implementation, structured data testing and verification. Here’s a great tutorial that will guide you every step of the way. What is your business vertical? Have you put in your preferred keywords yet to see if your competitors have implemented authorship? If they haven’t, jump on it! Until we meet again…keep it between the ditches! All the best,