Content Authorship in Travel and the Importance of Being an Authority

SEO is so much more than just building links, writing optimised anchor text and watching your site sail to the top of the rankings. It’s becoming more and more important to approach your travel marketing in a holistic, integrated way, which means combining the efforts of your PR, social media, SEO and offline teams to make sure that your brand is appearing across the web and being referenced offline as well as online.

An essential aspect of this integrated approach is to become viewed as a trusted author in your field. You want people to see you or your travel brand in various places interacting, creating great content and promoting other people’s quality content as well. The more you are viewed as an authority, the more trusted you become, and the more likely people are to view your content and engage with it.

This is also an important feature in light of the most recent Helpful Content Updates from Google, which have highlighted the impact that genuinely helpful and personal content can have on a blog or website’s ranking. A key part of this is demonstrating that the person who wrote the content is a unique and insightful individual, which authorship can help to prove.

In this article, we discuss the importance of content authorship in travel and the impact that an authoritative reputation can have on your brand and your website, as well as explain the best way to integrate this into your content and SEO strategy.

What is Authorship?

Authorship refers to the identity of the person behind a piece of content. When you’re displaying authorship with your travel content, you’re attaching a name and authority to it and putting a face to the information.

Authorship used to be a markup used by Google to help rank content, which put a ‘stamp’ on landing pages and blog posts that connected them to a specific author. This markup was discontinued in 2019, which has changed the way authorship is displayed and assessed on a search engine, but not removed the need for it or the impact it can have on a page’s ranking performance.

Why are Authorship and Authority Important?

Authorship and authority are increasingly important in travel content and marketing because they make your brand appear more credible and trustworthy. When a potential customer lands on your website or engages with a piece of content, they’re much more likely to convert or even consider making a purchase if they feel like your brand is legitimate and if there are real experts behind the advice and services on offer.

As well as impacting your reputation and contributing to conversion rates, authority and authorship also play a key part in SEO performance. As we’ll dive into later in the article, things like trustworthiness and expertise are used by Google to determine the quality of the content on a website, which in turn impacts how well it ranks on search engine results pages.

Authorship, Authority and Google

When it comes to demonstrating authorship and building an authoritative reputation that will benefit your website’s ranking performance, the following approaches should be incorporated into your existing content and wider marketing strategy to get the best results. 

The first and last points are related more to SEO, whereas the middle ones are more focused towards showcasing yourself as an authority figure, and making it more personal. And that in itself is important for Google, because quality content should be user-focused.

Author E-E-A-T

If you’re familiar with Google and its guidelines for well-ranking content, you’ll recognise the E-E-A-T acronym, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. If you’re not yet in the know, this acronym represents several of the key ranking factors from ​​Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG) which are used to determine whether the content on a website is relevant and of good quality.

In response to the need to design websites and create content with credibility, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab conducted extensive research with over 4,500 participants across three years and developed ten key guidelines to demonstrate credibility.

1. Verification: Information in your content should be easy to verify. This means including links to sources to support your points.
2. Transparency: It should be easy to determine that there’s a legitimate organisation behind your website, which you can do by listing an address and showing photos of your office.
3. Expertise Showcase: Focus on showcasing the expertise involved in your organisation’s content and services by listing credentials and only linking to legitimate and respected websites.
4. Trustworthiness: Demonstrate that trustworthy individuals are behind the content and services you provide, first by demonstrating that they are real people and then by proving their trustworthiness through biographies and images.
5. Accessibility: Make it easy for users to contact your organisation with contact forms and clear contact details.
6. Professional Design: Ensure that your website has a professional design and serves its purpose.
7. Usability and Utility: As well as being visually impressive, your website also needs to be easy to use and navigate.
8. Content Freshness: Regularly update and review your content along with posting new, evergreen content frequently to demonstrate your activity.
9. Promotional Balance: Avoid having too much promotional content like ads or offers on your website, and make sure that their purpose is clear.
10. Error-Free Experience: Minimise technical errors on the site, regardless of their size and impact on user experience.

All of these guidelines will help you uphold the E-E-A-T guidelines by demonstrating that your travel brand is a trustworthy and authoritative expert. But there’s more that should be involved in your wider marketing strategy, which we’ll discuss below.

Personal Branding

When we’re talking about personal branding and authorship, we mean the distinctive image, style and tone that the author of digital content has. A personal brand also incorporates specific areas of interest and expertise, which is particularly important not only when you’re trying to demonstrate that you’re a leader in your area, but also that readers should pay attention to your travel advice.

If you’ve got multiple people creating content for your website, then each of them should have an author’s bio attached to their work, giving background on who they are and what makes them qualified to write about this particular topic. You don’t necessarily need an individual landing page for every author, but having a bio featured somewhere on every blog post, and an ‘About Us’ page with photos and more personal information, will help to put a real set of faces to your content.

Your writers may also want to or have already developed their own personal brands through running a blog or being a social media influencer, which may have given them a dedicated following. If you can link to these websites or profiles, you give your authors more credibility, as well as highlighting their unique ‘brand’ as a writer.

Social Proof

Social proof links to the ‘trustworthiness’ element of the E-E-A-T guidelines, as it acts as evidence that your writers and your travel brand are actually respected and informative experts in your industry sector. If your travel guides have positive reviews, your brand has been talked about in industry publications, or you have featured on well-respected travel websites or podcasts, you’re going to gain more credibility by association.

Building social proof can seem like a daunting task, but the good news is that there are multiple avenues you can go down to gain this credibility and endorsement. Working with influencers or partnering with other brands is one method, as is encouraging customers to leave reviews and then featuring these on your website. Having your brand mentioned on social media, either by customers or industry publications or figures, is another great way to build proof that you’re a reliable brand with a quality offering. 

Authoritative Guest Posts

Guest posting is a key way to build authority, both by getting other, credible writers or content creators to partner with your brand or by getting your content featured on another, well-known website. From an SEO perspective this is a great approach for building links, but if you’re trying to build authority then it’s also a good way to get more trust and put your travel brand in front of a new audience.

Guest posting can be arranged through partnerships, by approaching authoritative websites and offering to write for them, or by trading guest posts with a similar business in your industry sector. You should have an author’s profile when you publish content on a different blog or website, and this will also help to build a reputation for your brand as a credible and real source of travel advice and insight.

Structured Data Mark-Up

Using Schema.org markup for content authorship provides search engines with additional structured data that helps them better understand the relationships and context between different entities, such as authors, articles, and the overall website. This, in turn, enhances the context and credibility of your content, indirectly contributing to a positive impact on SEO by providing search engines with the information they need to better understand and rank your content.

Final Thoughts

When you’re viewed as an authority, the content you write and share will be more trusted than published by a faceless brand or profile with very little personal information. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing for the Telegraph or a small travel blog; that content will be viewed with increased trust and therefore more likely to rank well in the search results. 

Established relationships and a strong standing in your niche are very important when it comes to ranking well and getting your content into a prominent position in the search results. These can be harder to create strategically, but should lead to established authors and trusted members of a niche becoming more prominent in the search results, rather than websites which have built 10 thousand directory links to their site and just happen to have been around a long time.

Travel websites will have to take a more integrated approach to their travel marketing campaigns, not just building links or updating Twitter, but combining the many channels out there to establish a strong brand, a recognised personality and trusted content. If you manage to do this well, your content will be seen as authoritative and trustworthy, and you will be viewed as an experienced, expert writer, helping to improve your website’s ranking and the reach and impact of your content.