How blog authorship benefits your website

If you don’t know what blog authorship is, let alone use it, you’re not alone! We have a handful of clients who are using blog authorship on their WordPress websites. The feature helps prolific small business bloggers take their blogging efforts to the next level by building valuable SEO back-links to their website.

SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and refers to your website’s visibility in Google for keywords relating to your products and services. Back-links are links on other websites which link back to your website. Reasons people might link to your website include if you are stockist of their product, if they like your product or service and want to feature it and recommend it to others. Back-links of this nature are generally accompanied by your business’s details and some content about a topic relating to your business. These types of links are mostly harmless and for the most part, you can’t control who links to your website anyway. Now, keep reading because the next bit’s important.

When it comes to back-links the keyword is “valuable”. You can’t pay for “valuable” SEO back-links, they should be earned. Well, actually you can pay for them, but you really shouldn’t – unless you want your website to potentially be wiped from Google’s search results, because the Penguin algorithm is designed to nut out websites with inauthentic back-links. We know someone who – thinking they were doing the right thing – paid someone overseas to build “valuable SEO back-links” to their website. Let’s put it this way: We had to build their website on a new platform with a new domain name and it took months of work to get them ranking in Google’s search results list again.

The reason why blog authorship builds valuable back-links is quite simple – it uses Google+ profiles and Google+ is a Google product, therefore its use is considered favourable. It requires the author to log into their Google Account and add a custom blog link back to their website which has blog authorship enabled. This process is seen as an authentic method of building valuable back-links to your website. If you’re still wondering what blog authorship is exactly, read on.

Blog authorship FAQs

What is blog authorship?

It’s a feature offered by Google for which GOOP has created a set-up service to make the process of authoring blog posts simpler, faster and more effective for time-poor small business owners. This service can be implemented on WordPress websites.

Blog authorship involves assigning individual blog posts to authors on Google+. For example, if you write a blog post about a specific product or service, before you publish it you select from a drop-down list of author profiles and choose the person who specialises in that product/service/topic area. This person’s name is linked to their personal Google+ profile on the blog post with a bio about who they are and what they specialise in.

Once GOOP has set up the feature, each time a blog post is added and assigned to an author, the relevant person needs to log into their personal Google+ profile and add a custom link which links back to that specific blog post. It takes the author all of five extra minutes, but the benefits for SEO are proven.

WAIT – I heard blog authorship is dead?

No way! While we were alarmed by initial reports recently that blog authorship was being removed from Google’s search results, it simply isn’t so. While you might not see your profile picture or other information related to your personal author profile, the process of back-linking to your website using Google+ is still really effective to help boost your website’s overall visibility in Google’s search results. Blog authorship HAS changed – but Google still offers it, we still offer the set-up service and the process still works for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

How will blog authorship benefit my website?

Authoring blog posts on your website using your personal Google+ profile adds valuable SEO back-links which strengthen the position of your website in Google’s search results. As always, it’s not enough just to go through the motions, you must produce high-quality content that is interesting, informative and contains keywords. However, if you are already blogging effectively on your website, then blog authorship will help you take it to the next level.

How do I add ‪blog authorship links to my ‪Google+ profile?

Operations/Marketing Manager, Amanda Ferry’s Google+ profile with blog authorship contributor links

NOTE: You must have blog authorship set up on your WordPress website in order to author posts using your Google+ profile.

Once you have published a blog post on your website log into your Google Account and complete the following steps through your Google+ profile:

Click the “Home” button

From the drop down menu select “Profile”

From the menu under the main image click “About”

Scroll down until you find the “Links” box

Scroll to the bottom of the “Links” box and click “Edit”

Under “Contributor To” select “Add Custom Link”

In the “Label” box add the blog posts heading

In the “URL” box add the link to the specific blog (copy and paste from the blog URL bar).

GOOP’s blog authorship star clients

Star client #1 – Geelong Financial Group

We couldn’t possibly go through a month about blog authorship without mentioning Geelong Financial Group! GFG was one of our first clients to start using blog authorship and the team has had great success using this feature to author their blog posts and take their blogging efforts to the next level. The team does it so well – each person writes and authors blog posts about different topics and all Google+ author profiles have consistent branding.

It’s clearly working for them too, with 12 out of their top 20 Landing Pages being blog posts, 66 percent of visits to their website coming from Google organic search and 73 percent of these are NEW visits*. Make sure you check out their blog posts and author profiles – they are a shining example of how to incorporate blog authorship into your online marketing plan.

Star client #2 – Leopold Swim School

Leopold Swim School’s director Rebecca is doing an outstanding job writing blog posts consistently on a monthly basis and using her Google+ profile to author the posts, building valuable back-links to her website using a Google product. Her blogging efforts aren’t going unnoticed with nine blog posts in the top 25 Landing Pages for the last 30 day period*, meaning blog posts contributed to 15 percent of a substantial amount of traffic to the site. Only 47 percent of visitors landed on the Home page and this figure will diminish as Rebecca continues to blog using blog authorship as more blog posts will act as Landing Pages. Well done Rebecca, keep up the awesome work!

Star client #3 – E.L Photography

Elisha Lindsay and E.L Photography blogger Courtney both use Google+ to author blog posts on the E.L Photography website. The SEO value of these links is evident when you look at E.L Photography’s Google Analytics data.

In the last 30-day period, a whopping 73 percent of all traffic reached the website via Google organic – unpaid – searches. Even more impressive is the number of blog posts acting as Landing Pages when people reach the website, with 16 out of the top 25 landing pages being blog posts for the same 30-day period*. This means blog posts contributed to 64 percent of traffic to the site! You can’t deny blogging and incorporating blog authorship is working for E.L Photography!

Star client #4 – Barnard Mind Solution

Barnard Mind Solution has a new website with GOOP and is also engaging us to write blog posts on a monthly basis. Kudos to the business owner Kerry who recognised the importance of blogging effectively on her website and not only engages GOOP to write high-quality content but also uses her Google+ profile to author the blog posts on her website.

Despite being such a new site with only two blog posts so far, these two posts are already doing well for the site. The September blog post is the second highest landing page and the other blog post makes it into the top 10 Landing Pages, despite being posted just last week! Of all the traffic to the site, 66 percent are new visitors*. As we continue to blog on Kerry’s website we expect the data to continue to trend upwards.

* Google Analytics data pulled from a 30-day period between September and October 2014.

If you’re interested in finding out more about blog authorship, blogging on your website or blog strategy training, please contact us. Based in Geelong, we provide a comprehensive range of online marketing services for small businesses – from responsive web design through to social media and more.

Feel free to click the blog authorship link below to visit the author’s Google+ page with back-links to relevant blog posts!