Search Marketing Sage

It’s National Tell A Story Day tomorrow, April 27th – and as a marketer, I love to tell stories. Ultimately, that is what your content should be doing: telling a story your customers can understand and relate to. But the biggest mistake we as marketers can make in our content is telling a story about our companies and products, and NOT our customers. You must know what challenges they have, how what you’re selling will help them with that challenge, and then create content that shows them this while making them the hero of your story.

I recently participated in a panel of very smart marketers at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, and we talked about how Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates created a fundamental shift in how we view content creation. All of a sudden, we needed to create content that was useful and people liked to read (gasp!), rather than just content to feed the Google monster and get rankings. So, the way we approached SEO also shifted – no more over-optimization practices, just good content that was not only searchable, but shareable.

But that doesn’t mean that SEO goes completely out the window when creating content. You can still optimize, just don’t over-optimize. You want to make sure that Google is still indexing your content correctly and for the proper keywords. Here are some tips to ensure your content is telling Google the right story:

For a while now, I have told all of my clients that they should set up Google Authorship and link their Google+ page with their blog or online publication. Authorship markup and other rich markup and schema is a way to be competitive in the search space. Not everyone has jumped for joy at the idea that their face could be seen within search results, but most thought it was a pretty great idea. Images in search results can really draw the eye away from other results and consequently, improve the click-through on that search result.

Authorship Markup is Google’s way of attributing content back to its author. Google is displaying author information in search results and can be set up by following an option listed here or by using a blog plugin. There are a variety of ways to make this happen, but all include making a connection from your Google+ page to content you publish and making the connection back from content you publish to your Google+ page. It’s exciting to see your face show in search results. At least in my opinion!

Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) has a new Lab called Author Stats. Author Stats is a page in WMT that “shows search statistics for pages  for which you are the verified author.” This requires that you log into WMT with the email you used to verify the account. I use a different one for Search Mojo, so I had to add my personal email to the account to have any data display for me. If you are in charge of managing a blog with multiple authors, this means that you will not be able to receive information on all the author’s Author Stats.

Within Author Stats, you can see each page Google has associated with you. Each post displays how many impressions and clicks you received, in addition to the click-through-rate and average position. All of these columns are able to be sorted, so you can sort to see which post ranked highest, for instance. The post I wrote that had the most clicks was a very hot topic during the Olympics this year. This data provides insight that should influence your content marketing efforts.

Have you tried out the Author Stats lab yet? What do you think? In my opinion, there is a lot of value associated with knowing the performance of author data in search results. I’d love to see the comparison between click-through data when my image was displaying, when just the “by Sarah Lokitis” line was showing, and when nothing related to authorship displayed! Hear that suggestion, Google?! Thanks for working on that! I’d love to hear your thoughts too, so please comment below or find me on Twitter @Lokitis.