Google Authorship is Google’s new way of connecting authors to their content. It unifies your scope of expertise across the internet and allows Google to determine your authority based on something more than backlinks.
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One of its most noticeable features is the fact that it adds your Google Plus profile picture to the search results of pages that you author. Why is all of this crucially important for small businesses hoping to establish a strong online presence?
Better CTR
Google Authorship doesn’t necessarily improve your google ranks. It doesn’t automatically propel you to the top of the search results page. What it does do, however, is improve your click through rate (CTR), and, in some cases, dramatically. It basically enhances the quality of your search result.
It has mixed media: both text and image, which looks aesthetically intriguing, and our eyes are drawn to faces by nature. It might not improve your search result, but it definitely improves the effectiveness of your search result, and, ultimately, the CTR is more important.
Credibility
Adding a face to the words of a previously anonymous person on the internet does wonders for credibility. Somehow, just having a human face on there makes the content feel more believable, and as a result, through Google Authorship, you’re building trust before the user has even reached your page.
Humanizing Search Results
The internet tends to feel anonymous and cold much of the time. Physically, the interaction is between a lighted screen and the person sitting behind it. By adding a face to the search result, it adds a face to the content, and somehow makes it seem just that much more human. In the real world, when we talk to other people, we see their faces when we listen to what they have to say.
Google Authorship attempts to recreate that familiar situation by adding a face to the search result, so instead of a list of answers, people find a group of experts. Thus, searchers will be much more likely to click on the one with a human connection than one without.
+1 to be the New “Like?”
+1’s and “Likes” are both statistics that measure your business’ popularity in a simple and basic way on social media. Facebook is currently the largest social media platform, and we have seen how the number of “Likes” that a business page has is directly related to how credible the page and business is seen, at least in the sphere of social media and the internet.
Google+ is gaining in members, though, and as more and more people adopt Google+, the +1 statistic will begin to mean more in terms of credibility. This trend is relatively predictable, and the sooner you start garnering those +1’s, the better.
Google Authority
Finally, Google is (obviously) going to like people who use Google Authorship. Google as a search engine is naturally going to appreciate your membership in Google Authorship and give you more authority for it. When google thinks you have authority, it’s always a good thing.
If you do everything else right, like produce quality content on a consistent basis, your authority will easily out rank that of others in your field, and your site (and face) will start popping up more frequently and closer to the top of the search results page.
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