A new study has suggested that UK authors could be missing out on the chance of increased visibility, traffic and advertising revenue by not taking up the opportunity of adding an online profile and bio.
The study revealed that in 13% of Google searched, as least one of the top 100 results incorporated author profile information including a thumbnail image and bio. The study further revealed that the majority of these results came from US authors and therefore the UK based authors were potentially missing out.
What is Author Bio?
Google have been showcasing their author bio feature for nearly a year and it is alternatively known as “authorship markup”. The idea behind the technology is that news, blogs and other online appearances of an author could be grouped together and this could help searchers find other articles by the same author in organic search results.
Google have indicated previously that their plan for author integrations was part of their drive to improve searches by eliminating poor content and that by making more authors accountable for their work, there would be an improvement in quality.
The majority of authors who currently appear in these results are those who write about technology, medical and food topics said search and social analytics company Searchmetrics who analysed 1 million popular keywords to come up with their findings.
UK Missing Out
However, the fact that more US authors are taking Google up on the opportunity than UK writers could mean that the UK is losing out significantly.
Marcus Tober the founder and CTO of Searchmetrics spoke about the results “More writers from US based sites are appearing in the top 20 because authors generally need to have a profile on the Google Plus social network to be displayed in author integrations – and we assume more writers for US sites are on Google Plus and also Google has possibly encouraged some US sites to set up their articles for author integrations.” He further suggested that UK authors had a huge opportunity to get ahead of their counterparts and make themselves more visible to UK searchers.
