Internet Marketing,
Google Discover: Why it Matters and How to Optimize Content for Discover Feed
January 15, 2021
Prashant Shukla
Google Discover is the new buzzword on every marketer’s lips. With a new platform like Google Discover, a new opportunity has presented itself for content-rich companies like leading media houses and online publications who hope to scale their online visibility. It goes without saying that optimizing content for this platform has become an inevitable need for every marketer and business today.
In this blog, we will discuss what Google Discover is, why it matters, and how you can optimize your content for Google Discover. Let’s begin.
What is Google Discover?
Google Discover is simply an updated and rebranded version of Google Feed – Google’s android device app. While its previous version was more text-centric, the new version accommodates different types of content to enhance user interaction. This includes:
- News
- Photos & images
- Video Content
- Latest blog posts
- Receipt materials
- Evergreen content
The idea is to transition from ‘text’ to an improved visual discovery of data.
Given its features, Google Discover is now branded as ‘search without searching’, because users don’t search for the content that gets shown to them on the platform. Instead, the platform recommends content to users, making it an interesting point of conversation and debate amongst marketers.
From this stems the need to answer specific questions like:
- How do I optimize my content for Google Discover?
- How do I ensure that my content gets featured on the platform?
- Is it possible to optimize my content for Google Discover?
- Is it worth spending time and resources on understanding the platform?
Why is Google Discover Important?
Google Discover acts and performs like a search engine platform. It is important because it presents you with the opportunity to attract search engine traffic and get more visibility for your website content. Here are two notable reasons explaining its importance:
Discover is everywhere. As the 1st screen on most android devices, it has simply become a habit to look at Google’s Discover feed for most people. Google is used by approximately 4 billion users worldwide. Every time someone uses the Google App on their mobile phones, they automatically land in Google’s Discover feed. With Google consistently pushing Google Discover, it’s only a matter of time before this becomes the #1 platform for accessing news, online resources, posts, and videos.
Image Source: Medium.com
Discover can help drive massive volumes of traffic to your website – much more than you realize. In fact, popular content-run companies like Hubspot have cited that they generate more traffic from Discover than search engines. As such, Google Discover is of particular interest to businesses that publish articles, blogs, videos, the content of any type – especially media sites. The more content you publish, the more you stand to gain!
New opportunity for news websites, media websites, blogs, and online publications. The advent of Google Discover is a force to be reckoned with. It presents a new opportunity for content-heavy websites like news websites, media houses, blogs, and online publications to capture the attention of billions of users who are already using Google Discover to explore their favourite topics and follow their favorite websites.
Moreover, Google has added a new reporting tool called ‘discover’ to your Google Search Console. This gives you essential information, such as:
- The website traffic you are attracting to your website from Google Discover.
- Gives you an idea of which content is performing the best. Meaning: you can replicate the successful posts and optimize the underperforming content.
- Data on how often your website is appearing on Google Discover.
- Analyze the performance of your content on Google Discover vis-a-vis other traditional search results.
- Access to the information mentioned above will help you redefine your content strategy and improve your ranking on Google – all while you’re having fun with it!
By giving you valuable insights such as the ones highlighted above, Google is encouraging publishers to optimize their content for Google Discover. This just goes to show Google’s commitment to making Google Discover better and more popular than it already is.
What are some actionable ways to optimize for Google Discover?
While there is no hard and fast rule to finding success on Google Discover, here are some actionable tips that can help you with your content strategy:
Tip 1: Improve your content quality
The importance of making quality content is as relevant as ever. Without quality content, you can never attract and retain quality website visitors. As such, you must take great care to ensure that you work to refine your content consistently. Doing this will make your digital marketing effort a success.
But this begs the question: What is quality content?
To this, we say that we can define quality content as a high-value content piece that offers value to its readers. Be it a 100-word summary or a 5,000-word exhaustive blog – your goal here is to provide quality content irrespective of the content length.
Some marketers make the mistake of unnecessarily shortening or elongating content just because it was pre-decided. Don’t make this mistake. Focus your energy on making high-value quality content that gives value to your readers. Your content should resonate with your audience and answer their queries.
When you do this consistently over a long time, you will find success not just in search engines, but on Google Discover too!
Tip 2: Use high-quality visuals
We recommend you to use high-quality images in your content. Why? Because Google has reported that they perform better on Google Discover cards. This report goes on to show that:
- On-page time spent by a user increased by 3% on using large images.
- It increases Click Through Rate (CTR) by a whopping 5%.
Adding a high-quality image to your content can transform an average content piece into a high-performing asset for your website.
Image Source: Youtube.com
If your content is all words and no visuals, you will lose your audience’s attention in no time because an average user has a short attention span and tends to lose interest if there’s too much content.
Your goal here is to ensure that your readers read your content from beginning to end. To make this happen, incorporate high-quality visuals into your content piece. Examples of high-quality visuals include infographics, animations, gifs, videos, graphics, and creatives.
Adding them to your content makes all the difference. Something as simple as adding visuals will elevate your content from a simple informative article to an engaging content piece that your audience will love to read and share. So what are you waiting for?
Tip 3: Create Exciting Videos
As discussed in the previous tip, adding visuals can help you elevate your content and make your Google Discover feed look more irresistible to your target audience. Creating valuable videos that solve the problems of your target audience might be another way to capture their attention and interest.
Choose your top-performing blogs and convert them into palatable videos. This way, you will succeed at generating a video on a topic that enjoys traction while providing an alternative learning model for those who prefer watching videos over reading blogs.
Create compelling videos that strike the perfect balance between entertainment and information. Without the entertaining element, your audience might quickly abandon your video content. And without giving value, your audience will have no reason to come back to your video.
Image Source: Premiumbeat.com
Here are some video ideas that you can use to make your video content:
- How-to video tutorials
- Product and service description videos
- Interviews with prominent authorities in your niche
Did you Know: Techmagnate also offers complete expertise in Video SEO.
Tip 4: Comply with Google’s Content Policies
Another simple hack to optimize your content for Google Discover is by following Google’s Content Policies. Among others, Google’s content policies outline the rules a creator should follow regarding copyrights, deceptive practices, ads, and sponsored content.
When your content gets picked up by Google Discover, and it will enjoy more visibility as the likelihood of your content being shown on other Google properties such as Google News also increases. So your task here is simple:
Conform to Google’s publishing policies. Doing this will improve your likelihood of appearing on Discover.
Tip 5: Optimize your content for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
Google’s Search Console has a Discover report feature that helps you compare your AMP and non-AMP data. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP). It is an important ranking factor for Google Discover. As such, we can say that AMP Optimisation is crucial for attracting visibility on Google Discover.
To optimize your content for AMP, enhance your website’s user experience. You can achieve this by optimizing your page loading speed. So the better your website’s page loading speed, the better your UX performance, and the better your UX, the better are your chances of ranking on Google.
Image Source: Objectadsolutions.co.uk
Additional Read: Accelerated Mobile Pages vs Progressive Web Apps
Tip 6: Get added on Google Discover’s ‘Interest’ and ‘Collections.’
Google Discover is a fascinating tool that allows you to add content to your collections. It lets you choose the topics you want to follow. Here’s what you can do:
Ask your community of loyal followers to add you to their topics of interest or collections on Google Discover. Doing this will enhance the visibility of your content on this platform.
Once you get added to people’s collections on Google Discover, your audience will get notified when you publish a post or when Discover showcases content from your blog.
Tip 7: Publish both ‘Evergreen’ and Trending Content
Google Discover shows you both evergreen content and fresh trending content that is most relevant to a user’s search query. As such, you can target two types of content pieces:
-
Evergreen Content: Some topics never die out because of the nature of the topic and a user’s consistent interest in it. Every industry or niche will have an evergreen topic that is always in-demand. You can begin by targeting this type of content as there will always be a search interest in this type of topic or question. If you run a blog, a digital magazine, or an online news digest, you need to write and optimize evergreen content and put it out there. Doing this can expedite the growth of your website because not everyone has mastered this trick yet. You can be a front-runner and leading website that generates massive views on Google Discover if you start now!
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Fresh Trending Content: You can also target new trending topics in your niche at a given time to cover new queries that people may have. Being the first to cover new topics exhaustively can make all the difference and help you rank on Google Discover faster than your competition. It is highly recommended that you make it a routine habit to stay in the forefront of trending topics to expedite your chances of ranking on Google Discover and its SERPs. Given how it is the job of media houses and news websites to publish the latest news and trending topics, Google Discover has obviously become an achievable source for finding an army of new subscribers.
Additional Read: Latest Content Marketing Trends
Tip 8: Analyze your Competition
Let’s say that you have employed all possible avenues to increase your content visibility on Google Discover, but it’s just not happening for you. What do you do? Where do you go?
Here are some things you can do:
Analyze your competition. That’s all. Conducting competitor research will give you an insight look into important factors such as:
- What your competition is doing better than you.
- What your competition is doing differently to appear on Google Discover.
- What you can do to beat your competition.
Google Discover is picking your competitor’s content over yours because they are doing something right. Analyzing their posts and evaluating which of their content is making it to Google Discover will give you an idea of the content strategy you can adopt.
Google News v/s Google Discover: What’s the difference?
Google News and Google Discover are Google apps that are available to users on their mobile devices. Google News features trending news stories from around the world. The app is news-centric and does comprehensive, up-to-date news coverage of important issues of both local and global imminence.
Here are some news topics covered by Google News:
- News updates from your country
- News coverage from the world
- Local news
- Latest business news and updates
- Technology updates
- Entertainment news
- Sports coverage
- Latest discoveries in science
- Health news
On the contrary, Google Discover shows you content around topics that interest you. You don’t have to look for them explicitly. Whether you’re interested in sports or politics, fashion or veganism, science or drama – the app is here to cater to your interests via on-app recommendations.
All you have to do is follow your topics of interest and based on your past search history, Discover throws up content that you might love.
So in some ways, you can say that Google Discover works like platforms like Medium where you read content pieces centered around topics that align with your interest.
Conclusion
The Google Discover app is an incredible resource in the hands of an organization that is smart enough to adapt to it. Whether you’re a marketer, a blogger, or a business owner, it is high time to come to terms with the endless possibilities that come with Google Discover.
Google Discover also poses as a brilliant opportunity for content-rich websites that run on content. If you’re a media house or run an online news digest or magazine, you need to optimize your website content for Google Discover before other businesses in a similar niche outrun you. As a leading Digital Marketing Agency, Techmagnate have helped many media houses, online magazines, news websites, and digital publications attract and scale their website traffic on Google Discover. We can do the same for you. Enquire now to know more!
FAQs
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How to Track Traffic from Google Discover?
You can track the traffic you are getting from Google Discover on Google Search Console. The Search Console comes with a Discover Performance Report which shows:
- The volume of your website traffic
- The number of clicks received
- Your click-through rate
- How often your site appears on Google
- The number of impressions
- Your best performing content on Google Discover
- Your content’s performance on Discover over traditional search results
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Is Google Discover available on Desktop?
No. At this point, Google Discover is not available on the desktop.
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What are the cards in Google Discover?
Google Discover operates in the form of cards. The app shows your content in the form of cards.
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How do I add Google Discover to my home screen?
Adding Google Discover to your home screen is easy. All you have to do is drag and drop the app to your home screen.
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How to disable Google Discover?
Disabling Google Discover can mean two things. Here’s what you can do to ‘disable’ Google Discover from your phone:
- Firstly, if you don’t want to get notifications from the app, you can simply switch off app notifications. Go to your settings, click on the app, and switch off your notifications.
- Secondly, if you no longer want the Google to discover the app on your phone, you can uninstall it from your smartphone.
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