What is Google Discover and How to Optimize for It?

Google is continuously trying to improve its user experience. With the use of modern technologies like AI and machine learning, Google is now focusing on offering personalized experiences to its users via ‘Google Discover.’ It’s a personalized feed of content that users can access on their mobile phones. While this offers more convenience to users, it also opens new doors of opportunity for website owners to boost their organic traffic. By optimizing website content for Google Discover, one can establish recurring organic traffic to their site. But how can you optimize for Google Discover? Let us find out the answer through this article.

What is Google Discover?

Google Discover, formerly called ‘Google Now,’ is a personalized feed of content that displays relevant content without the need for any input from the users. It is accessible on mobile phones and helps users discover content that aligns with their interests and preferences. Users can find news, stories, videos, or images, that are relevant to their interests. With this feature, Google aims to deliver fresh and relevant content directly to users’ feeds without them searching for it on the internet.

Just like social media platforms like Instagram use AI-powered algorithms to show posts and reels based on a user’s interests, Google Discover also uses machine learning algorithms to analyze users’ data and personalize their feeds. Users can even personalize their Google Discover feed by selecting the topics of their interest and adjusting their preferences under Google Discover settings. 

Types of Content Displayed by Google Discover

Google Discover displays a wide variety of content types on users’ feeds, which include:

• News Articles: These are fresh and trending stories, usually from trusted sources.
• Blog Posts: These are evergreen topics related to different industries, such as travel, health, lifestyle, and more.
• Videos: These are videos, usually from YouTube, that align with user’s interests and past behavior.
• Product Recommendations: These are product recommendations or product reviews from reputed e-commerce platforms.
• Images and Infographics: Infographics or high-resolution images that resonate with users’ areas of interest.
• Paid Discovery Ads: Users may also see paid ads several times throughout their Google Discover feeds as they scroll.

How to Get Your Content in Google Discover?

Here are few tips that you can consider to optimize your website content for Google Discover:

1. Create High-Quality Content

The quality of content plays a significant role in determining whether your content deserves to be on Google Discover or not. Focus on creating high-quality content that resonates with the interests and preferences of your target audience. Do thorough research about your audience, analyze historical data to understand their interests, and try to develop content that aligns with their interests. You can also conduct competitor analysis to check the strategy of your competitors who are often visible on Google Discover.

Your focus should be on answering the questions your target audience is asking, but answer them in a more engaging and interesting way. Just make sure that the content you write is relevant, up-to-date, and fulfills the user’s search intent. As per Google’s Discover guidelines, your content should be primarily created to help users, and not to rank on search engines. Also, it should follow the EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) principles. 

2. Optimize Headlines

Write catchy headlines to attract the user’s attention and encourage them to click on the URL to read the content. You can pose questions or incorporate statistics into your headlines to make them interesting. But make sure not to use clickbait as it is against

Google’s guidelines. Whatever you mention in the headline, should be there is your content. It is important to make the headline catchy.

But you should also ensure that it is genuine and relevant to the content.

3. Add More Visual Elements to Your Content

Visual elements like images, videos, infographics, GIFs, etc, can make your content more engaging. User retention is important to get your content on Google Discover. Incorporating such visual elements into your content will help you improve the content’s presentation and drive higher user engagement, which further results in improved retention rates. It has been found that setting image preview to ‘large’ and uploading wide images (at least 1200 pixels) results in more visits from Google Discover. 

4. Maintain a Balance Between Evergreen and Timely Content

Evergreen content has its own irreplaceable value as it always remains relevant. You just need to update this content from time to time in order to avoid content decay. However, it’s not a good idea to limit your website's content to just generic and evergreen topics. Try to cover both evergreen as well as time-relevant content in order to establish better credibility in your niche.

As per a study, 46% of content visible on Google Discover is from news websites. This shows that timely content is most likely to appear on Discover. It tends to prioritize content that is up-to-date with the latest trends and covers the latest stories, popular topics, or ongoing events. This shows how important it is to post timely content in order to be visible on the Google Discover feed of users.

5. Improve Expertise and Build Topical Authority

The authoritativeness of your website content is another significant factor contributing to your site’s visibility on Google Discover. Your content should be well-written and should demonstrate your expertise in the field. Publishing high-quality user-first content is the key to gaining higher authority in your niche.

You can build topical authority by covering important industry-specific topics in detail. Create topic clusters and showcase your subject matter expertise. Your content should have at least some unique perspective that sets you apart from the competition. This could be a strong point in gaining higher visibility on the Google Discover feed. 

Using Google Search Console to Check Discover Performance

Google Search Console not only helps you analyze your site’s performance on search engines but also on Google Discover. To check the performance of Discover in Google Search Console, you can go to the dedicated tab for ‘Discover’ and see the overall traffic coming from Discover feeds. Moreover, it also allows you to analyze the traffic for specific posts. By looking at what type of posts bring you maximum traffic from Google Discover, you can improve your content strategies to increase your visibility on Discover. 

What SEO Experts from MadHawks Have to Say?

If you manage to get your website content on the Google Discover feed of your target audience, you can see immense growth in your site’s organic traffic. However, this will require some real effort from your end. As mentioned above, try to create user-first content, i.e. prioritize user experience over search engine rankings. Instead of stuffing keywords or doing anything else to manipulate search engines, try to give genuine answers to user queries in your content. 

Google itself prioritizes user experience now. So, creating high-quality content is extremely important to be visible on Discover. Apart from this, focus on covering trending as well as evergreen topics, and add visual elements to drive higher user engagement. 

We at MadHawks have years of experience in optimizing website content for search engines as well as Discover and we strongly believe that quality matters more than quantity. Being a top content marketing and SEO agency, we at MadHawks can assist you with your strategy. For any further information, get in touch with us!

FAQs

1. What is Google Discover SEO?

Ans. Google Discover SEO is the process of optimizing your website content for Discover. It can be done by creating high-quality content that caters to your audience’s needs and interests.

2. How to rank better in Google Discover?

Ans. To improve your site’s visibility on Google Discover, you can consider the following tips:

• Create high-quality content that follows EEAT principles
• Add visual elements to your content
• Create both evergreen and timely content
• Focus more on user experience than search engine rankings

3. What are the benefits of Google Discover?

Ans. Some significant benefits of appearing on Google Discover include:

• Higher visibility and traffic potential
• Better audience growth
• Better brand reputation
• Improved user experience 

4. How do I rank first on Google SEO?

Ans. To rank on the first page of Google search results:

• Create high-quality original content
• Focus on on-page and off-page SEO
• Optimize technical elements of your website, such as fast loading speed, easy navigation, etc