Google Authorship and Your Attorneys Secret Online Competitive Advantage

24
Feb
2013

Natalie Alesi

Google Authorship is a new feature recently launched by Google. While there are many new social technologies and tactics, this is one that your law firm and marketing department may want to pay attention to more fully. Here's the lowdown on how it works.

When your attorneys author and publish a blog post on the web and a client searches for that particular topic where the attorney's blog post shows up, the attorneys name and picture will appear in the Google Search results.  

Hence, Google Authorship lets your attorneys claim ownership rights to that content. The search results add the picture and By Line of the Author. This is important on many levels, one being that it humanizes the content. See the below example:

Here's the caveat, your attorneys need to have a Google+ Profile setup.  Google+ verifies that you are a real person via your Google+ Profile (and not some random spammer).  If you have been wondering if Google+ is really worth it? This would be the tipping point for me and a good time to get ahead of your competitors.

In addition, it's relatively easy to set up your attorneys Google Authorship. Any blog site or website administrator can easily set up the necessary tags for your attorneys posts using the rel=author or rel=publisher (please excuse geek speak here). Just ask your blog or site administrator, they will know how to do this. If you are a smaller firm and have this responsibility yourself, you can easily Google, Google Authorship, and find a multitude of good blog posts on how to set it up.

Still skeptical?

Here are three top considerations for your law firms marketing innovation initiative in 2013:

1. Authorship is easy to maintain, implement and has almost immediate results when potential clients search for topics that your attorneys blog about.
2. Authorship gives credibility to your attorneys in Google's eyes which can help increase their thought leadership and online reputation when clients don't always realize their internal firm reputation.
3. Authorship is intimately tied with Google Search, a result which allows your firm to gain competitive advantage by enhancing your attorney's digital footprint way before your competitors can even catch up.

So, will your firm take the plunge? Are your attorneys using Google+ yet as a social channel for business development? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and success stories.