Marrying Authority With Your Brand's PR Content Strategy

A look at how authorship still influences your brand’s news and public relations content.

Building authority continues to be critical in search engine results, regardless of the fall of Google’s semantic authorship markup. Optimizing your meta data, headlines, and being on top of trending keywords helps your news content rank. No question about that. But quality content conveying expertise, authority, and trust plays a key role in gaining positive organic search results.

“Authoritative authors tend to do better in search because their content generates the kind of responses that lead to actual, present-day search signals,” says Mark Traphagen, senior director at Stone Temple Consulting and a Google+ expert.

Whether or not search engines continue to evolve and incorporate author credibility as a ranking factor, authority and influencer tools enable brand publishers to have even more control over the quality and credibility of their content.

Your goal as a marketing or public relations professional is no longer to have SEO-heavy content on your brand’s newsroom, website, or blog. Today’s goal is more about increasing the amount of powerful and magnetic content on your site while following optimization best practices and finding the right authors to create that content.

Authorship: Modern-Day Public Relations

However, the archaic rules of yesterday that resulted in drab titles, flat copy, and trite themes no longer apply. What’s current, what’s now, and what can move the needle on your public relations news and marketing content clout in a positive direction is subject matter authority — both the technical and human aspects of it.

At the core of any public relations framework should be the creation of newsworthy, relevant content that’s leveraged on every level to reach the right audience, and subject matter experts, authority, and influence should be part of that equation. Once you have authorship integrated into your brand’s publishing strategy, the next step is to find influential writers to contribute to your branded content who understand and have authorship established on their ends.

Sourcing the Right Authors to Write

The goal of most brand publishers is to have journalist-quality authors (in-house and external) who are subject matter experts in your industry. Your team of writers must lead visitors through a path to conversion through their compelling, unique content.

Finding contributors with content authority is invaluable for your brand. But, the question remains: How do you vet the authors?

Through leveraging trusty influencer and authority tools like Klout (social-based), BuzzSumo, Inkybee (blog-based), ClearVoice (social and web-based), or sourcing authors the old-fashioned way at industry events, you can certainly find the right voices for your brand’s content.

lisa-buyer-authorship

The Social Tie-In

Influential content creators often boast a strong social follower base and have a tribe of evangelists. When influencers share content, it resonates with more people and in more relevant circles, and that tribe of followers is more apt to promote the author’s content. This in turn turns more heads toward your content and brand.

The Search Tie-In

The content that authoritative authors produce is more relevant, timely, and intelligent — key components of content that appears high in Google search results.

“Even without Google Authorship or any actual Author Rank as search factors, authoritative authors tend to do better in search because their content generates the kind of responses that lead to actual, present-day search signals. For example, an article by a trusted author is going to be more widely shared on social media. That leads to more visibility and exposure to new eyeballs. Inevitably some of those eyeballs will belong to other content producers who will link to the authority’s content, and those links produce real search traffic,” Traphagen reported in a recent interview.

In light of the retraction of Authorship announcement, Google says that the dropping of Authorship won’t impact other efforts to explore how authors are identified and rewarded within their search algorithm.

“Google may have (or is certainly developing) other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story,” notes Traphagen. “This includes comparing the byline to semantic and linguistic cues in the content. For example, If an article says it’s by Chris Brogan, and the writing style, vocabulary, subject matter, type of site it appears on, and sources of links to it, all match well with other pieces written by Chris, Google may decide they have high confidence the content is written by Chris Brogan.”

Bylines may be a key signal to Author Rank moving forward. More importantly, content quality will be the biggest contributor of search strength. While Google will continue to tweak their search algorithms, the goal of marketing and public relations content creators should focus on carving out a niche and authoring outstanding content.

The bottom line: Subject matter expert content creators will have the best real estate on Google, leading to better brand awareness, website traffic, and conversions.

Image via Shutterstock.

Subscribe to get your daily business insights

Whitepapers

US Mobile Streaming Behavior
Whitepaper | Mobile

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

5y

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...

View resource
Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups
Whitepaper | Analyzing Customer Data

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

5y

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics f...

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...

View resource
Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people
Whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its peopl...

2y

Learning to win the talent war: how digital market...

This report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...

View resource
Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy
Report | Digital Transformation

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

1m

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Exp...

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...

View resource