Author Authority

In this guide, we’ll explore what author authority is, why it matters for SEO, and how it helps build trust with both users and search engines. You’ll also learn practical ways to showcase expertise, improve credibility, and strengthen your content strategy.

Why Care about Author Authority?

The concept of Author Authority is a simple one: a search engine, and a user, will trust an article written by an expert more than one written by a complete stranger. This is a fundamental part of providing high-quality content.

A search engine’s goal is to give users the best and most trustworthy information. A search engine will try to figure out how authoritative an author is on a certain topic. For example, if a renowned SEO and a relatively unknown SEO both write about the latest digital trends, a search engine will likely give more weight to the one written by the known expert. This is how author authority comes into play in SEO.

How Google’s Knowledge Graph Helps

You might be wondering how a search engine knows who an author is. One way is through the Knowledge Graph, which is a huge database of facts and entities. These entities can include renowned professionals in their fields, such as doctors, lawyers, and coders.

If your authors or contributors are officially recognized entities in the Knowledge Graph, it’s a strong signal to a search engine that they are experts. A search engine will use this information to determine how much authority they have on a topic.

Researching Author Reputation

You should also research your authors’ reputation. A search engine’s quality raters are given specific instructions to obtain reputation information about organizations and content contributors. You should follow the same process. You can evaluate your authors’ reputation by looking at their professional profiles, their work, and their mentions in reputable publications.

Leverage Structured Data & Keep Tabs on Its Performance

Structured data is a way of telling a search engine that a specific piece of content is about a person or an organization. You can use schema markup to enhance your E-E-A-T by marking up information about your authors and your organization.

Here are a few things you can add to your author’s biography pages and mark it up accordingly with Person structured data:

• The author’s social media profiles
• Their educational background and credentials
• Their job title
• Their professional affiliations

The “sameAs” attribute is vital for linking your authors to other places they are mentioned online. This helps a search engine build a complete picture of an author’s reputation.

Leverage Google Scholar

If your authors have published scholarly work, you can use Google Scholar to your advantage. Google Scholar helps a search engine find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. If your authors appear in Google Scholar, it becomes easier for them to claim their profiles. This is a great way to create a connection between a search engine’s organic search results and Google Scholar.

Monitoring the performance of your authors is good for both users and SEO

It’s important to remember that a search engine has confirmed that none of the methods listed above are ways to directly impact organic search rankings. However, they are all methods that can be used to evaluate your authors’ content quality and performance. These evaluations are not only vital for SEO performance, but they also allow for a better experience for your users, which should be the ultimate goal. A professional SEO platform Clickrank can help you with this. The platform can analyze your website and provide a prioritized list of tasks to fix these issues.