How to Make an Author Box with Kadence for Better EEAT

You’ve read a newspaper article online and seen the byline at the top, “by Nina Clapperton” (well, by someone else. I haven’t written for newspapers or magazines in almost a decade).

You may like the person’s work and want to know more about them.

Often, this information comes at the bottom of the article. There will be an author box with a succinct bio that tells you who this person is, what they specialize in, and why you should trust them. It may also tell you where to find more content by them, if they’re not full time at that paper.

It makes you trust that person and their content.

The same goes for a blog!

Most bloggers run a single author site where they write all the content themselves, or they have ghost writers who use the main author’s name. So they assume the audience knows them and they don’t need this box.

Nope!

Google and your audience aren’t 100% sure who you are. One way that we make it clear is with an author box set up with proper schema.

Thanks to Kadence, you don’t need to be a coding expert to set this up. It’s incredibly simple and this step-by-step tutorial is all you need to get it done in 5 minutes.

Not familiar with an author box? This is what one looks like (or you can scroll and see it at the end of this blog post):

How to Add an Author Box in Kadence

To get started, you need to have a the Kadence theme activate on your site. The free theme is all you need for this process, although I have the paid version and do really like it.

Once you have Kadence active, here are the steps to turn on the author box:

Step 1: Go to your WordPress dashboard and hover over “Appearance” on the sidebar. Then click “Customize”. Alternatively, if you’re logged in to WordPress and on the front end of your site, “Customize” is a button along your top menu bar.

Step 2: Click on “Posts/Pages Layout”. This is where you can adjust the formatting for every post/page on your website. Select “Single Post Layout” here.

Step 3: Scroll down the sidebar for the Single Post Layout formatting options until you get to “Show Post Author Box?”. Toggle it on (this will make it a dark blue colour and put the circle on the right side of the slider).

Step 4: Beneath this, two new options will appear: “Author Box Style” and “Use Author Archive Link?”. Select “Normal” or “Center” for your format. I use “Center” on She Knows SEO. And toggle on “Use Author Archive Link?”. This links your author box to your author page, so Google knows which articles you wrote.

Step 5: Check that it worked. At the bottom of a blog post, check that an author box is showing. If you have no content filled in for it yet, it will only have your name.

Step 6: Click “Publish” to lock in these changes once you’re happy with them.

Now you have an author box on every blog post on your website!

If you have a single author site, where you are the only author of all the blog posts, the next steps will only need to be done once.

But if you have multiple authors, every author is going to need a bio, photo, and relevant links. So plan to repeat these steps for each author with a publised post.

Video Tutorial

How to Add a Photo to Your Author Box

I like to have a photo with my author box to show a little preview of my face. You don’t have to do this, but if you want to here is how you’ll set it up.

1. Go to “Settings” -> “Discussion” in your WordPress dashboard. This is where we typically control our settings for commentors.
2. Scroll to the bottom of this page where it says “Avatars”. You will need to select “Show Avatars”. Kadence pulls from your Gravatar image for the author box preview, and this setting overrides the system’s ability to find our Gravatar.
3. Create a Gravatar image. You need to make a Gravatar account with the same email address used for the user. You can find this under “Users” -> [Click on the specific user to edit them] -> Scroll to “Profile Picture”. There is a link beneath this that you can click. “You can change your profile picture on Gravatar.”

Now, your photo will show up on your author box, as long as it’s turned on (which you should have done in the steps under the first header).

You can check that it’s showing up on any blog post.

If it’s not showing up immediately, you may need to clear your blog’s cache.

How to Link Your Author Box to Your Author Page or About Page

Once you have your author box showing, you need it to tell people who you are. This happens in two ways: the text in the box (we’ll do that next), and the connection to your author archive page or your about page.

I recommend your author archive page, but I’ll show you how to do both.

This will make your name in the author box link to this page, passing an internal link that tells Google who “owns” this blog post. And it gives more context about who you are, and what you know.

We can tell Google “hey I know SEO”. Ok, but anyone can say that. Or we can say it AND link to an archive with over 100 blog posts about SEO with detailed tutorials.

I’d trust the second more, wouldn’t you?

That’s why I recommend the author page over linking to your about page. Yes, the about page will often have a more in depth bio, but it’s going to lack the schema you need to tell Google in depth who you are, and lack the links to every blog post for topical authority.

It’s a bit weird to add this link, so I’ll walk you through it step by step:

1. Go to “Users” -> [click on the specific user profile].
2. Under “Contact Info”, it allows you to input a website. Most site owners put their blog’s URL here because it isn’t clear. BUT this is where you need to put your author archive URL.
3. Your URL should be “https://DOMAINNAMEHERE.com/author/[username]”. The username will be the same one you use to log into your blog. So it’d look something like: https://sheknowsseo.co/author/admin/
4. If your username is NSFW or something problematic, I recommend changing it. It’s best if it’s your name, even just your first name.
5. Add your URL into the box and hit “Update Profile” at the very bottom of the page.

Now go and test that the link works.

If it doesn’t, you may not have saved it, or you may need to clear your cache.

You can put your about page link here instead, but I think it’s best to link to the author page since it has built in schema.

What to Write in Your Author Box

Now you have a pretty, and functional author box. But it needs to say something about you.

Who are you? Why should be people listen to you? What are your qualifications and areas of expertise?

An author box is a QUICK bio. Think 3-5 sentences.

It should immediately tell the user:

• Your name
• Relevant qualifications, like med school for a doctor or years of experience for a dog walker
• Your experience/expertise in your website’s content silos, like “lived in Rome for 20 years” for a Rome blog or “over $40k in t-shirt sales” for a t-shirt ecommerce site.
• How you help your audience

I use this as my bio for summits, bundles, and podcasts. It’s a great, easy way to snag your bio for other projects. So think of this as something that will be used on and off site.

We want a reader to get a sense of who we are and build trust, even if they haven’t read any of our content yet.

Author Box sameAs Schema

sameAs schema essentially tells Google “oh, you’re that John Smith!”

It’s a way to connect your web presence across the web so that Google can tell it’s all from the same person.

Between different usernames, emails, and pictures, it can be hard for Google to figure out which Nina Clapperton I might be.

By tying together my social profiles, my author pages from my old freelance writing days, and my Youtube channel, I make it clear to Google that I’m the person who did all of those things.

Google can then connect a lot more of that information and get social proof that you are who you say you are.

So how do we add this to our author boxes?

No complex coding required!

Active Rank Math (free) and Kadence (free). Then you can follow the next steps:

1. Go to “Users” -> [click on the specific user profile] -> Rank Math SEO
2. Enter your Twitter username and Facebook profile URL to begin with. Then, under “Additional profile URLs”, add any URLs that help prove that you are you. I include all my social links here, my different author bios or bylines, and you can even link to your author websites’ author pages (I don’t do this for privacy reasons).
3. Scroll to the bottom and click “Update Profile.”

This will add these to the schema of your author box. It doesn’t actually show all of the URLs in your author box. But, if you use the free Ahrefs Chrome Extension, you can check the “Structured Data” tab to see what schema is present on a page.

When done properly, it looks like this:

You have to be on the front end of your site for this to work. It doesn’t work when you’re editing a post.

Indexing Your Author Page

For Google to see your author page and get context about your experience, you need to index the page.

By default, SEO plugins no index the page for some reason.

Active Rankmath to fix this.

1. Go to “Rank Math SEO” on the sidebar in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Under “Titles & Meta” -> “Authors”, you want to “Enable” author archives. Lower on the page, change “Author Robots Meta” from “no index” to “index”. This will automatically override the settings for all of the author archives on the website.

Alternatively, if you have a bunch of author profiles but only one person publishes content, you can set this at a user-based level.

To do this, don’t change the index tab in Rank Math.

Instead:

1. Go to “Users” -> [click on the specific user profile] -> Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Rank Math box.
2. Click the “Advanced” tab and select “Index” under the “Robots Meta”.

This will index only this specific author on your blog, and not change it for anyone else. It will override the no index setting from earlier in Rank Math.

Conclusion

Make sure to take time to create an author box for each author on your website.

Some bloggers choose to do this when they accept guest posts on their website so that Google knows every individual author on their site.

Others just put the guest post bio above the “author bio” that will be populated by the site.

Regardless, you need an author box on your site for your users and Google to tell who you are and why the fuck they should listen to you.

Obviously, do this in your blog posts as well for EEAT. Take the time to write a proper introduction that covers you experience and authority on that specific article. But not every article is going to show your overall credentials for your site-wide niche, the way this is.

You need both a really strong introduction and a strong author bio to connect with your audience, and prove you are someone they can trust.

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