Google Discover has been steadily sending more and more traffic to publishers over the years. According to a recent report by Nieman Lab, Google Discover is sending more traffic than Google Search to a few US publishers.
Naturally, you wouldn’t want to take Google Discover lightly. But how do you get Google Discover to send traffic your way? Here are 7 things that you can do to optimize your website for Google Discover.
But, before we jump ahead to the checklist, here are a few prerequisites that you must full fill to appear on Google Discover
Prerequisites For Getting Into Google Discover
- Must Be Indexed in Google- If your website and articles are not indexed in Google, they will not show up in Discover
- Must adhere to Google content policies- Now Google Discover has its own separate page for content policies. Read them here. When you go over it, it’s almost word to word as Google News policies.
- Must have High Resolution Images. Pixelated images or lower resolution images ruin the user experience.
- Articles must have clear dates, bylines, information about the author.
- Site must provide information about the publication, the publisher, company or network behind it, and contact information to better build trust and transparency with visitors.
- Timely Content
How to Optimize for Google Discover?
Coming strictly from Google’s mouth, John Mueller,
“You might create and optimize content to fulfill specific search needs for the search engine traffic, but there is no way to create content that explicitly targets Discovers interest matching”
This is true but there are certain best practices you can do to increase your chances of getting more of the Discover trend. Google Discover is highly personalized, which means that no two users will get the same result. But instead of focusing on individual users interest matching, you start building a persona for your Google Discover audience.
Here we use machine learning, we take all Google Discover URLs in Google Search Console and then we get all the entities for each of these articles and use machine learning to cluster these entities together and then we come up with this.
So it seemed that the most of the traffic in July 2020 was coming through face masks, recipes, zodiac, trump, taylor swift and so on.
If you understand the entities from the articles that drive most of the traffic to your site from Google Discover you really understand your audience from Google Discover.
You need to understand your Google Discover audience and their growth interests. This is a key to optimize for Google Discover.
7 things that you need to do to optimize for Google Discover.
1. Deliver Quality Content.
Having content that’s timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights.
Having content that is timely is a key. Content that tells the story well and it provides a unique insight is what matters the most. Operating word here is ‘unique insights’. This is mentioned in Google Top Stories, in Google News and Google Discover. which means that Google appreciates diversity in coverage.
So if everyone is covering a certain angle about a certain incident that’s happening and if you can present a different angle or different insights to the same incident, Google appreciates that and wants to present diversity to their users.
Don’t just cover, what millions of other publishers discovered. Can you cover it from a different angle, a different opinion?
While the majority of content in Google Discover is timely (Newsy/Trending), we still see evergreen. The majority of the content, maybe two thirds or more is timely content between one and three days old. But we still see content that is two months old, three months old and when you think about evergreen content. For example travel, new hobbies, shopping etc
Make sure that your evergreen content is refreshed often and is kept relevant. So when you have a guide and this is the same strategy you do for Google SERPs. Track your evergreen content and relook when it drops in traffic.
On Titles –
- Having page titles that capture the essence of the content, but in a non-clickbait fashion. This goes back again to News SEO optimization
- Having a title that is descriptive and straight-forward. It should not be vague or click-bait
It’s the same kind of practices that Facebook had for click bait and engagement bait. If you work in social media, you will get a lot of these concepts.
Avoid tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (titles, snippets, images) to increase the appeal, or by withholding crucial information required to understand what that content is about. Avoid tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation or outrage.
2. Include High Quality Visuals
- Images need to be high quality and need to be at least 1200 pixels wide and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting for the best results.
- Avoid using a site logo as your image. Since the image will be scaled and resized to meet different mobile screen resolution requirements.
- Avoid manipulated media
- 16:9 Aspect Ratio Hero Images for your article
- Have a descriptive file name appropriate for the image.
- Appropriate Alt Text
- A descriptive caption
Remember images and visuals are very important.
3. Optimize For Mobile
John Shehata states that “AMP is not a prerequisite for Discover but I analyzed ten thousand Discover results from the Google Discover feeds. I found that 60% or more are AMP. Again – This is not scientific. This is me just going over and over and over many feeds and I found at least two thirds If not more, of all the feed content that is recommended by Google Discover is AMP.”
Over the years Google has shifted the attention from AMP, to Core Web Vitals which is crucial for mobile performance. As a result, pages need to load faster and should be mobile friendly. While AMP had some weightage earlier, it isn’t a significant ranking factor anymore. Having a good core web vitals score will ensure that your articles a better chance of showing up on Google Discover.
Another thing also to look at is, if you go to Google Search Console, select Discover performance and then select Discover appearances to look at where the traffic is coming from.
4. Helpful Content First
In August 2022, Google introduced the helpful content update. Here is the addition to the Google Discover page:
“As part of Google Search, Discover makes use of many of the same signals and systems used by Search to determine what is helpful, people-first content. Given this, those looking for success with Discover should review our advice on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.”
EEAT signals help boost helpful content right onto the Discover feed of users. Google’s documentation further states that ” Google’s automated systems are designed to use many different factors to rank great content. After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T.“
Let’s discuss the 7 things that you should absolutely focus on
- Have a secure site (use https://)
- Articles must have clear dates, bylines, information about the authors.
- Site must provide information about the publication, the publisher, company or network behind it
- Site must provide contact information to build trust and transparency with visitors.
- Create and maintain an “About me” page for each author to explain their trustworthiness in detail
- Feature short biographies under every article published.
- Link to Author’s social media profiles.
Mention every kind of information on the “About me” page that can help raise the E-E-A-T score.
Things such as:
- Author experience in the field
- Organizations the author is associated with
- Awards author has won
- Accomplishments
- Links to pages backing up their authority such as Wikipedia, Linkedin, Interviews, authoritative websites, etc
Also use a person schema on “About the author”. Refer this example of a person schema:
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”:http://schema.org”,
“@type”: “Person”,
“email”: “email@site.com”,
“image”: https://author-image.jpg”,
“jobTitle”: “Job Title”,
“name”: “First Last”,
“birthDate”: “YYYY.MM.DD”,
“url”: https://www.site.com/author-profile-page”,
“sameAs”: [
https://www.facebook.com/author”,
https://www.linkedin.com/in/author/”,
]
}
</script>
5. Consider Buzz Factors?!
The next thing may not be mentioned anywhere else but there is a buzz factor in Google Discover. Google keeps mentioning ‘engaging’ over and over again.
Google looks for how the audience it recommends an article engages with it. The longer time they spend reading the article, the more likely is Google to recommend it to other people with the same interests. Another factor that Google does consider is how often the article gets shared. When Google identifies an article that it recommended being shared, its a strong signal to Google that the content is helpful, therefore share-worthy.
Google Discover is more or less a social feed:
- Monitor social engagement of your content
- Focus on engaging, shareable trending topics
- Monitor time on site and bounce rates
- Optimize social buttons on your mobile site and apps
6. Get your knowledge panel.
If you are a business, an entity, a brand, make sure you get your knowledge panel. This is information from Google. knowledge panels or entities have a follow button. Users can follow and this is an explicit signal to Google that I care about this entity. I care about this business and then they start getting more information from them
Allows users to follow Entities from Knowledge Panel
7.Uncover your Google Discover Audience Interests
If you go to your phone in Google Discover settings, you will see Google’s telling you here is the information we collected about you.
So you cannot get access to the user information right. But if you do what i told you in the beginning, collect the Google Discover articles, run NLP on top of these articles, Google has a free NLP tool up to five thousand calls a month for free. Collect these entities, cluster them and understand your goal.
I took this article that showed up in my Google Discover Feed. I clicked on the three dots and it says,
All I did is I went to the article, I got the article content. I went to Google NLP. I put it there and you will see it showing that New Jersey is an entity. I live in New Jersey. Anthony Fauci is the most important entity. It’s a person. Covid It’s very strong entity.
So you can call it all that information, cluster them and understand the people that the interest graph of the audience that come from Google Discover to your site and keep doing this.
You can do this If you have tags on your site, this is i did this in like twenty minutes. collected all the tags from all the articles that drove traffic, did some excel magic very quickly and very easily.
I can tell that the top tags on our site.
This is how I identified: I don’t like to use editorial tags, I’d rather use NLPand entities and so on. But these are when we write about news or politics or trump or coronavirus were really good.
High traffic from Google Discover right verses like we keep writing about hollywood. You can do the same analysis by section and so on. Now finally most of the traffic coming from Google Discover will last for like a day or so. There are some instances where the traffic lasts for a month or sometimes more But this is very rare. Most of the traffic will last for one day’s spike.
Google is promoting new content formats such as short-form vertical videos (including those from YouTube Shorts). It also supports interactive media such as polls and quizzes. This drives up engagement as readers can now perform an action. Participation from readers is also a signal to Google.
So utilize all the different aspects or different channels to reformat your content in different ways. Podcasts just started appearing a couple of days ago, Ads are already a part of Google Discover. Evergreen content is being given more and more in Google Discover. Some users even said that they saw Reddit comments in Google Discover
Google Discover is evolving as we go along and is slowing altering the way news and content is consumed. If you want to stay up to date and not miss out on any updates on Google Discover, subscribe to our newsletter.
