Make the most of marketing your business online with Google Authorship
– By Emma Dalzell
In our blog on Google+, we mentioned the Google Authorship. It was one of the questions that came up in a networking meeting a couple of weeks ago, so we though it might be useful to give you the low-down on how you might be able to use Google Authorship to increase the online marketing presence of your business – namely pushing it higher up in the Google search rankings for surprisingly little effort!
Before we go any further though, you do need to have a Google+ account (still not sure? Read our blog on the subject). When you have a Google+ account, you can appear within Google search results as an ‘author’. If someone is searching for something you’ve talked about,(ie blogged about) those keywords will be picked up and your content will be displayed. This can include posts you’ve created on the network, or content you’ve created on your own website, as long as your site content links to your Google+ profile – this is called Google Authorship and gives you the advantage over your competitors in search results.
A couple of tips though…Google’s instructions are not that simple. You’ll need to ensure your Google+ profile has a nice headshot as your image will appear alongside the search results. This gives you more credibility and makes your business more ‘human’, so it is definitely worth it! Make sure your blog or web content has “by Emma Dalzell [insert your name not mine though unless you want my face appearing alongside your content!]” within it as this is how Google Authorship links your content to your Google+ account. Although you can do this in the back end of your website (ie the code) in our experience it seems to be more effective if it is within the actual content of the blog.
Within Google+, you’ll see a “Links” section on your “About” page. You’ll need to ensure that you add the link to your blog in this section too. And don’t forget to “post” the blog to your Google+ profile as an update. You can test whether it is worked with the webmaster tool. You can also ‘Google” yourself – not a bad thing to do occasionally anyway – to see if it has worked.
This does unlock huge potential for businesses and is a great branding exercise as well as increasing your online marketing presence. By creating connections and engaging with people on Google+ and discussing any topic be it personal or business related, when one of those people does a Google search related to your business or any topics you’ve discussed, it’s more likely that you and your information will come up first, pushing other companies which might normally have had a higher listing to the back of the queue!
However, in line with our down-to-earth brand values and honest approach, we have to say that whilst Google Authorship is a great tool, it can be somewhat frustrating and time consuming, so it isn’t for everyone. Even so, if you blog a lot and want your credibility and knowledge to stand out, then it just might be worth it!