July 24, 2013

Google and other search engines are constantly altering the way their search results appear to the end user. Back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, when Google and Yahoo were just starting, the results consisted of a listing of 10 blue links with a slight description of the website located just below it. Now, Google, Bing and the other major search engines are equipped with advertisements, sitelinks, images, rich snippets authorship tags and much more to enhance their search results and make them more user-friendly.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

As you can see, search results have come a long way since the early part of this century.

Most of the individuals I’ve spoken to about these enhanced search results find them extremely useful and most have said they are more likely to click a result which has one of these features. That thought brings me to the point of my post, how the authorship tag, which can be easily added to your website or blog, can drastically help increase your organic click-through rate (CTR).

I recently did some work with Douglas Marketing Group for a local criminal lawyer named Frank Retar. After having his website designed late last year, he was finding that it wasn’t appearing in the search results for any of his preferred keyword phrases. He asked us to take a look at his site and evaluate what the problem may be. After running one of our free SEO assessments, we found that his META information and keyword selection needed to be improved.

Shortly thereafter, he hired us to search engine optimize his website and the next day we began our strategy. Of course all the basic strategy key points came into play: keyword optimization, META information update, backlinking and more.

After a few months of implementing our SEO strategy, we found that while Mr. Retar’s website was appearing more frequently in search results, the CTR was below average to average. That’s when we decided we wanted to try the Google Authorship tag to enhance his search results.

Implementing the Google Authorship tag is fairly easy. I plan on writing a “how to” post on it soon, but for the time being you can check out Google’s instructions on how to do it here.

The authorship tag we put in place took about two weeks to appear in results. Here’s what it looks like:

Pretty snazzy right? Not only did it enhance the look of the result, but it dramatically increased the amount of clicks through to the website. Since we added the Google Authorship tag about 4 weeks ago, we’ve seen an increase of between 10-20% percent on several keywords.

So why the increase in clicks? None of the research I’ve done really shows a definitive answer, however many of my colleagues in the SEO business believe it could just be the simple fact that it looks different than most other search results. Some have also said that putting a face to a link/name may also be a factor.

Whatever the reason, the key takeaway is that people are clicking these types of results more than others, which means whenever you have an opportunity to add an Authorship tag to your clients’ search results, you absolutely should.