If you are like most passionate bloggers, you spend hours working on your blog, creating post after post that showcases your passion and provides thoughtful insight about what you love.
To get the word out, you may have spent time optimizing your well-loved content and sharing it with others in the hope that it would one day be found via search. If you have done everything right, you may even start seeing your blog toward the top of search results pages for topics surrounding your passion.
If that is the case, and you are still not seeing an increase in visitors to your blog, you might be thinking: “WHY IS NO ONE VISITING MY BLOG?!?”
The sad truth is: Someone might be hijacking your hard earned traffic!
Queue Google+ Authorship.
What is Google+ Authorship?
Essentially, Google+ Authorship is a way for you to tell Google, and therefore the world, that you are the author of your blog.
As a reward for contributing this information, your picture may appear front and center next to your blog’s listing on search results pages.
Sounds great, right?
Well, if you do not currently have this set up, you might be thinking: Who the heck is that?!?!
That, my friend, is who is hijacking your traffic.
Google+ Authorship and other types of “rich snippets” have been known to increase click-through rates by 150%!! That means, 2.5 times more people will click on the listing with the photo – taking clicks away from the other listings, particularly the top 3 (that could be you!).
Why Should You Use It?
If hijacked traffic isn’t incentive enough, here are a few more reasons why you should consider adding Google+ Authorship to your blog.
Distinguish Yourself
- Authorship gives you a way to stand out from the crowd (see the image above – you’d click that link, right?)
- This distinction has the potential to increase the number of searchers who click on your link (more traffic!)
Help Like-Minded Searchers Join Your Community
- Authorship helps search users identify quality content easily from the search results page
- Because it’s linked to a social network, it encourages those who share your passion to get involved with the conversation (engagement!)
Additional Insight in to the Performance of Your Content
- With your Google+ Profile and Google Webmaster Tools you can see how many impressions and clicks you are getting for each post where you are the author (even guest posts!)
- This information is easy to review via Google Webmaster Tools, check out this blog post from Google to find out more.
How to Implement
OK, you are sold! Now, how do you add this great resource to your blog? Here are a few easy steps to follow:
Google+
- Create a Google+ Profile (if you don’t already have one)
- Upload a clear headshot of yourself along with other information you would want to share with the world (interests, hometown, favorite color…)
- Add your blog under “Contributor to” in your profile
On Your Blog
- Include a by line on each post the clearly says “By AUTHOR NAME” – for example, at the top of this post it says “By Chelsea Wilson”
- Verification
- Option 1: Verify your email address
- If you have an email address that is on the SAME domain as your blog, verify your email address with Google.
- For example: Your blog is “ilovebaking.com” and you have an email address “bcrocker@ilovebaking.com”
- Use the link provided above to submit your email address for verification
- Option 2: This is a little technical
- If you don’t have an email address associated with your domain don’t fret, there is another way!
- Include a link to your Google+ Profile on your blog posts using “rel=author”
- Here is an example (be sure to fill in “profile url” with your Google+ profile):
- If you use WordPress, you can use a plug-in to automatically do this for you!
- One option is to use the Yoast WordPress SEO plug-in (which is also a great tool to use for other SEO purposes)
- Be sure to add your Google+ profile URL to your “profile” in your WordPress account
- Option 1: Verify your email address
Check Your Work!
Once you have completed all the steps, verify that you did everything properly using Google’s testing tool. When it’s done right, your results should look like this:
One important thing to remember is that Google will not show authorship for every search query. Authorship appears only when Google thinks it will be useful to the user. So don’t be disappointed if you don’t see your picture on every results page, if you have done everything correctly it will show up when it matters.
And that is all! Now your blog will have just as much visibility as any other (possibly more). No longer will your hard earned traffic be hijacked by a fellow blogger! Add Google+ Authorship to your blog today, and start seeing the benefits.
For more information on how to use Google+ and other social media platforms to promote your blog, check out our post entitled: “Social Media Tools for Bloggers.”
