Want to Dominate Google Discover? Seven Practical Tips from website owners who have done it
Discover reports enabled in GSC of one of my websites this morning and I have been feeling elated since then.
Its always good to have the ability to track a new traffic source for your website.
What is Google Discover?
If there is one thing that Google couldn’t do well, it’s dominating the social media space. Orkut, Buzz, Latitude, Google+ could never make a mark while other social networks survived and thrived (Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tiktok) amidst the Facebook onslaught. The latest attempts are Youtube Shorts and Tangi; only time will tell how they will fare.
Google Discover is another such attempt albeit with a different flavor. It replicates your social feed experience with the content based on your interest. Its the query-less search touted as the future of search.
Google’s AI-driven content recommendation tool based on the user’s interests, search history, and a few other factors.
If you are using an android phone, you must have noticed Discover cards like below
The stories are delivered in the form of cards or news items.
Google’s Machine Learning algorithm collects data about the user’s search behaviors, location, interests, and matches both fresh and evergreen content to their interests.
The discover feed is personalized based on user’s habits, interests, and the way they consume content on other Google products such as Google News, Google search, Chrome browser, etc. As a user, you can change your preference anytime.
Is Google Discover Really the Big Thing?
Discover already has 800 million+ users and it’s growing. Like everything else, most Fomosepien SEOs would choose not to ignore the significance of Google’s new focus.
Google Discover is still a significant development for content marketers and publishers who are already stressed with the rich snippets and decreasing CTR. Unlike rich snippets, Google Discover is meant to drive traffic to your website. It’s both an opportunity and a threat depending on the way you look at it.
It depends on your objectives, here are a few pointers to help you decide.
- If you are a publisher with news focus creating lots of fresh content, its a no-brainer, ( Do everything possible for Google Discover to notice you), you can get 30–40% of your overall traffic from Google discover.
- If you are SAAS software or a B2B company, check if it worth the effort, it helps in branding but not much with traffic.
- A significant chunk of your site’s visitors that come from Google discover are return visitors.
- It builds familiarity, habit, and content loyalty. Repetitive impressions induce brand recall among your readers. Google Discover is your earned retargeting
- You can distribute a variety of content formats via Google discover such as blog posts, images, videos, and infographics
- Your new content gets an immediate spike.
There are two types of content. The first is evergreen content, which will consistently appear on users’ feed. And then, there is the content with a brief shelf life on Google Discover. Google will only display these pages for 2–3 days; thus, you will only see a very brief spike in traffic from Google Discover. Unfortunately, for many businesses, their marketing efforts may produce content that falls under the later, e.g., news articles or blog posts covering “fresh content,” says Hung Nguyen from SmallPdf.
Once you have considered Google Discover as one of your traffic channels, here are a few strategies that can help.
Practical strategies to dominate Google Discover
There are no special hacks, tags, or structured data to rank your content on Google Discover. The algorithm is highly personalized to each user and their interests, says Daniela Furtado from Findable Digital Marketing
Create High-Quality content
The Google Discover algorithm matches quality content with user interests. Quality content stands a chance to appear before a new set of audiences based on their topical interest (Even if they never interacted with your website earlier)
User’s search history is a major factor in deciding what appears in their discover cards. Your repeat visitors are most likely to get it first. With engaging and quality content you can reach a bigger segment of Google Discover audience. Consider the following steps to enhance the quality of your content
- Make sure your content is providing value to your reader, every single time.
- As Google E-A-T guidelines suggest, a trustworthy site with authority content is likely to rank better in Google Discover.
- Link to Primary source whenever you are linking to an external source in your content.
Google considers both fresh and evergreen content for Discover. Keep a healthy mix of fresh content, latest trends, and evergreen content in your niche.
Authority of content creators
The expertise of content creators is an important factor. You can hire domain experts to build authority in your niche. Just hiring a domain expert is not enough. Google should be independently able to verify the expertise of your authors. Here are a few steps you can take to enhance author reputation
- Create an author bio and a page. Highlight the domain expertise of the writers. Legal content written by a lawyer and medical advice written by a doctor is likely to win the trust of both google and the end-user.
- Build authority by contributing to reputed sites in your niche. An expert is widely acclaimed and mentioned. If authors on your niche also appear in other reputed places within the niche they are likely to earn more trust and respect.
- Speaking in industry events, seminars, contributing to research and scholarly work is another way of building a long term reputation.
- A good social media presence with a decent fan following is also an important factor in building your reputation.
In Google’s own words “The two best ways to boost the ranking and performance of your Discover content are (1) to post content that you think users would find interesting and (2) to use high-quality images in your content. Publishers experience a 5% increase in click-through rate, a 3% increase in time spent on their pages, and a 3% increase in user satisfaction when Discover cards feature large images instead of thumbnail images”
Create Visual Content
Make sure that the banner image of your article is 1200 px wide and google has permission to use it. To give explicit permission fill this form or create AMP pages.
Images are key. Even before Google changed things to weight content with images higher, users were more likely to engage with it. It’s the same on any social media platform, too. You need to include good images with your content, and especially mobile-optimized images that are readable as thumbnails, Says Dan Bailey from Wikilawns
High-quality Youtube videos are also eligible to appear in Google Discover feed.
Increase your content fans
The more someone interacts with your content, the more chances it will have of appearing in their discover feed.
Keep an eye on the hottest news in the respective industry and produce high-quality news that is more likely to get maximum upvotes on Reddit retweets on Twitter and shares on Facebook. In our case, whenever a piece of news gets viral on Reddit it gets featured on Google Discover. ~ Bilal Uddin from Withintheflow
In other words, your content fans are most likely to see your content in their Discover feed. If you are creating quality content, promote it to your
- Social media followers
- Email subscribers
- Google my business followers
- Paid promotions in social media feed.
- Retarget audience with content
Implement Schema
I must clarify that its not a schema ranking factor (listed nowhere). By implementing schema you can enhance the context of your written content. Here are a few common schema types you can use.
- Article Schema — Article schema helps you highlight a few common properties such as author name, rating, article topic, etc.
- Breadcrumb — Another important schema to help Google understand the depth and hierarchy of your content.
- Person — using person schema you can highlight the authorship of your content, it helps you increase the authority of your content.
Additionally, you can use event, video, and organization markup to enhance your content further.
AMP and Site speed
For Google Discover super fast pages are integral, so ensure your site scores well in Google page speed insights. To this end, it’s worth consider implementing AMP on your site as this gives you an incredibly fast loading site to a standard Google has outlined and a bonus is you get a small ranking boost on Mobile. ~Tristan James, Assisted
Google optimizes all of its services to promote mobile viewing, and Discover is no different. It’s key that your content and website not only load quickly but are mobile-friendly from an experience standpoint. That includes the sizing of images, length and width of paragraph copy, and how your incorporating calls-to-action. Check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test website. This can give you a holistic view of your website's performance. Also, next time you take a look at your website or social media presence on your mobile device, make note of anything that stands out to you. Was something difficult to read? Did you not want to take the time to read a lengthy paragraph? If you won’t digest your own content, what hope does a prospect have? ~Dan Weiss, RA Fischer Co.
Google Natural Language API
Google NLP is another good tool that you can use to ensure that your content is understood well by Google. First two paragraphs are most important, check your content in the API demo tool to see
Your content falls in an appropriate category with a significant confidence level
B. There are no misunderstood entity semantic relationships.
To wrap-up, Google Discover is one more traffic avenue for content marketers. You also need to track the results of your efforts. If you are getting a significant volume, Google will enable discover traffic reports in Google Search Console.
If the Discover report is not enabled, you can check your AMP landing page report in Google Analytics to check how much traffic your AMP pages are getting.
Does your content appear in Google Discover? If not, what are you doing to get traffic from this new medium? Share in the comments.
