How Much Does Authorship Matter for SEO?
In SEO, as anywhere in digital and traditional marketing, content is king. You simply cannot move up your ranking without developing content for your website and others. This content tells both web users and search engines what your business is like — its industry, products and services as well as its intended audience and established values. Text-based content, like blogs and white pages, have long been the most powerful because they are the most easily parsed by search engines for the purposes of ranking.
For you to use content to improve your SEO, you need to have someone create that content — but who? Debate has long raged regarding the merits of keeping content creation inside the company and outsourcing to third-party content creators. As Google and other search engines become more sophisticated, does the concept of authorship continue to matter?
There are several reasons that authorship continues to matter in 2020 and beyond, but the two most important reasons are that you need your content creators to produce high-quality content and that in the near future Google might track content authorship.
What Good SEO Content Creators Do
One of the biggest reasons to carefully choose who creates your content is the concept of content quality. Quality is rapidly becoming the most important ranking factor for Google and other search engines, and content creators have full control over the quality of SEO content. Thus, it is important to vet content creators to ensure they can provide high-quality services — but what does quality really mean when it comes to content?
In the broadest possible terms, quality content is successful content. High-quality content will attract a large number of web users, who in turn will share the content with their contacts, and as viewership grows, search engines will recognize the content as quality and reward it with a high ranking. What makes content fall into the category of high-quality varies largely based on audience, but there are a few factors that are heavily impacted by content creators. These include:
Language competency. Content creators should have the same native language as your audience. Native language speakers understand how to write in natural patterns that online audiences will connect with. Slightly “off” patterns of language are distracting to an audience, who will likely turn away from content clearly not created by someone with their native tongue.
Industry knowledge and experience. Content creators should be competently knowledgeable about the industry for which they are creating content. This is beneficial for several reasons: It ensures that content contains valuable information for its audience, it helps to avoid obvious mistakes and misconceptions with regards to industry concepts, and it provides credibility to the brand, which builds loyalty amongst consumers.
SEO knowledge and experience. Finally, content creators should have a grasp of SEO to produce effectively optimized content. SEO content is primarily for living, breathing web users, but it is also in part for search engines — to help your domain in general climb the ranks. Content creators who work for a quality SEO agency, such as Digital Current, understand the balancing act of SEO content and will be more successful at performing it.
Authorship of SEO content matters because certain content creators will lack the above skills and qualities, all but ensuring that the content they create isn’t as successful at accomplishing your goals. You need to be careful to hire SEO service providers, to include content creators, that can provide the quality you need to improve your ranking and pursue other SEO goals.
How Google Understands Authorship
Even Google is encouraging you to be more considerate when selecting content creators. Since 2019, Google has steadily increased the attention it pays to authorship, strongly encouraging the use of content creators that boast the above abilities — natural language skills, industry experience and SEO awareness — to ensure that content is valuable to web users and its own algorithm. Though Google hasn’t gone as far as to track authorship signatures as a technical ranking factor, relying on known and trustworthy content creators could improve user experience and thus positively impact rank.
Google is getting better and better at identifying markers of bad content which makes it all the more critical that you invest in high-quality SEO content creation. By looking for authors you can trust, you will gain content that attracts a loyal audience and accomplishes whatever marketing goals you set.
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’s disclosure policy.
