Scandals like Cambridge Analytica and fake news became all the rage in the past years.
Senate hearings apart, big tech is under pressure by the media that are only waiting for their next error.
That’s the reason why recent updates of Google and YouTube focused on prioritizing results from trusted sources, especially if the topic of discussion is delicate - so-called YMYL (Your Money Your Life), which means all the medical, loans, and critical subjects.
But how can you signal Google and the other search engines that you’re a trusted source of information?
There are some simple things you can implement today to create positive factors that will more often than not, increase your search traffic.
1. Verify Your Google My Business
Google is fighting every day not to allow spam and low-quality websites to show up in their search results.
Guess what a spam site will hardly have? A physical location.
If you verify your Google My Business profile with your address, phone number, and other information, and you remain consistent with this information across all platforms where your company is active, it will work as a positive trust signal for you.
2. Author Schema and Bio
Add an author box with a bio and the social media profiles of your author.
This is particularly important if your blog is in niches related to health or other YMYL.
If you’re recommending whether to take vaccines or not or what are the symptoms of a particular illness, you not only have to be an MD but also showcase your credentials.
As of January 2020, Google doesn’t seem capable of understanding credentials or not, but their team is working on getting better at it. Perhaps if you are a doctor with a strong social media presence, it will surely help.
That’s why I add this, although I don’t touch medical topics, I write about management and business instead. I do have an MSc in Management from a top University, and I display this in the posts I write for my website Astrogrowth.
You can easily add author boxes with a plugin if you’re using Wordpress. It is not necessary to add your author box in the about page or contact page. I’ll soon tell you what to do instead of on those pages.
3. Domain Verify Your YouTube Channel
This one is easy peasy — just log-in with the YouTube profile of your business.
Now go to Advanced Settings and associate your website.
Google owns YouTube, and this is another positive signal you’re giving them that you’re a real and trustable entity.
Quick note, you need to verify your account with your phone number before being able to associate your website.
4. Link Rel=Publisher
That’s another easy one. Go on the Theme Header if you’re using Wordpress or the equivalent in your website’s code.
Add the following code at the beginning of your header:
<link rel="publisher" href="">
<link rel="publisher" href="">
<link rel="publisher" href="">
<link rel="publisher" href="">
<link rel="publisher" href="">
<link rel="publisher" href="">Inside hrefs, you need to add all the social media profiles where you usually syndicate or publish your posts. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube.
It’s another way to interconnect your presence on the web, underlying trust.
5. Organization Schema
Schema is a code you can add in your pages and gives information about your website and page that is easily digestible by Google’s bot that crawls your pages.
One Schema, in particular, will help you showcase more trustworthiness, and you easily add it on your About and Contact pages (in some case on the home page as well.)
I’m talking about the “Organization Schema.”
Here’s the code you can add (make sure to include your details):
<script type="application/ld+json"> {
"@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "Organization",
"name": "Company Name",
"url":"Company URL",
"email":"Company Email",
"telephone":"99999999",
"sameAs": [
"facebook.com",
"twitter.com"
],
"address" : {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"addressLocality": "SD",
"addressRegion": "CA",
"postalCode": "90210",
"streetAddress": ""
}
}
</script>
6. Improve Your About and Contact Page
About and contact pages are often some of the most visited pages on websites.
They can also be significantly important to give more trust signals.
Here are some quick tips on what to include in your about and contact page:
- Display Real Company Details. Your address and phone number if you have one.
- Have different emails for different departments.
- Have a “Meet the Team” Page
Conclusion
Google and other search engines are getting better and better at understanding if a page is worth ranking high or not.
There is a lot of pressure on big tech to curate the information they display. That’s why if you search for something on YouTube, you’ll prior see big media brands before regular publishers.
Whether this is correct or not, that’s the trend they’re following, and you need to make sure to showcase as much as possible that the content on your website is trustworthy.
The easy-to-implement tactics in this post will help you to take some low-hanging fruits, but the real path to becoming an authority in your space is a long-term game like everything else that’s worthwhile.