If you’re a publisher, SEO professional or a CMS platform, you should already have implemented a means for verified ownership. Authorship has been around for a few months and has gone through some fine-tuning, resulting in a great feature that really enhances your search engine visibility.

In fact, I’d question any SEO company that’s not pushing their clients to ensure they have accomplished this. I’ve written about verified ownership and how to implement rich snippets in WordPress. It’s not as easy as dropping in a plugin (yet), but it is essential.

Why? Google has finally provided the data to prove how effective having your verified author image is in search results. Within Google Webmasters, there’s now a section in Labs dedicated to tracking your verified authorship pages:

Within the Marketing Technology blog, there’s a 484% difference in click-through rate on our verified author links in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) than on our other pages. That means that folks are almost 5 times as likely to click on our links with the author photo than links without it in the SERP.

484%!

If you’re a publisher and you’ve not implemented rel=author, rel=me and publisher links, you need to do it immediately. If you’re an SEO professional, you should be pushing all of your clients to implement this solution. If you’re a CMS, this feature is a must.

Do it. Now.