Google Authorship & Its Insane Impact On Website Traffic [Infographic]

One of the most important things to do when building a successful website is to continuously analyze the way it constantly increases in traffic. You can’t just sit idle and hope people will start finding your website. You need to promote, produce and procure traffic any way you can. However, never buy traffic! That will do you no good since it is just a scam in 99 cases out of a 100. Google Plus has created a few interesting traffic generating features though, and Google authorship is one of them.

It’s not really a traffic generating feature per say, but it has some rather interesting side effects. Google Plus has had a projectile-like rise to the top. It is now the second most used social networking service (according to this infographic called The Irresistible Rise Of Google Plus And People Rank – The New P.R.). You might be able to trace that success down to its ever evolving features. When Google authorship was introduced, many people didn’t know what it was. Most people still don’t have a clue about its traffic impact, or even its usage as a feature.

Google authorship is a way to help search engine users find content from people they know or want to connect with. Basically what you do is personalize the visual search engine result and claim it as your own. For example, it means that when you have Google authorship incorporated on your Google Plus profile and your website, Google will start indexing the content you have created with images, circle count and a whole lot more. It helps Google further rank your content, and it is said to even increase you rank if you have Google Authorship enabled.

The real interesting side effect that comes with “signing up” for Google authorship is that it has been proven that people who use the Google search engine are more likely to click search results with a picture and Google authorship information than any other search result that shows up. As a matter of fact, in some cases, it increases Google authorship user’s content click through rate up to 150%. If anything, that should be of interest for any website owner.

So is Google really going to be able to give Facebook a run for their money (and of course users)? At the rate that Google is continuously adding, refining and inventing new social networking features, that might very well be the case. It looks like we all need to make another run to once again pick up our Google Plus accounts and start interacting. After all, if you want traffic, you need to be where the traffic is generated, right? (Infographic presented by Attwood Digital)