As winter melts away, many of us find ourselves energized and ready to take on new challenges. You may have the urge to exercise more, eat lots of greens or give the garage a good spring cleaning. But what about your professional goals? If you’re looking for new ways to promote your practice online, you’re in luck. Google Authorship can help you gain a significant edge on your competition when it comes to reaching new patients.

We already know that prospective patients are looking for you on the Web. Hopefully, you’re helping them find you by offering an informative website, publishing blog posts and sharing relevant content to inform and attract them. But are you then left crossing your fingers, hoping that browsers will find all that useful information? Utilizing Google’s Authorship feature can help ensure that your content is not just another needle in the Internet haystack.

What Is Authorship?

If you’ve noticed search engine results accompanied by a thumbnail photo of the author, you’ve already seen Authorship in action.

Authorship is Google’s way of verifying original, quality content written by experts like you and improving the integrity of its search results. It is also Google’s way of getting a piece of the social pie, since you have to set up a Google+ profile to use it.

Through a relatively simple process, detailed below, your written contributions to the Web are integrated with your profile. This allows you—and only you—to “own” your original content and reap the rewards of being an active and thoughtful contributor.

What Can Authorship Do for Your Practice?

One of the most important aspects of Authorship is the influence it will have on your prospective patients. It is safe to assume that people who search the Web for aesthetic services are visually oriented. A photo of your smiling face among a list of plain-Jane search engine results is compelling. It inspires trust and implies credibility, as do the links to other content you have authored.

How does all of that translate to more patients? Anecdotal evidence shows notably increased click-through rates for those who utilize the author markup. Additionally, most SEO specialists agree that Authorship will eventually have a significant impact on search engine rankings.

Author-tagged content is content that Google trusts to be original and credible, which carries weight with both humans and Googlebots that determine page rankings. It is assumed by Google watchers that the company will launch a new tool, called AuthorRank, within the next year. Many are calling AuthorRank the biggest change in Google’s algorithm to date. The purpose of AuthorRank is to incorporate human elements—such as an author’s knowledge of certain subjects and their reputation in the online community—as ranking factors.

Since weight will be given to the author rather than just the website, there is value in claiming your content and starting to build your AuthorRank now.

How to Use Google Authorship

Even though Google Authorship has been active for more than a year, word has been slow to spread about the service and its potential to improve click-through rates. If you are among those who have not yet embraced Authorship because it seemed too complicated, you will be happy to learn that it is quite simple.

Step 1: Set up a Google+ account.
Go to accounts.google.com/ to create your profile, and be sure to upload a high-quality headshot. Think of this profile as the social “face” of your brand and craft your profile information accordingly.

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