How to Effectively Optimize Content for Google Discover

What is Google Discover? How does it work and why should you include it in your digital marketing efforts? How do you optimise your content? If you’re running a small business it is important to understand Google Discover and how you should optimise your content for better search results.

What is Google Discover?

Google Discover is an updated Google Feed that provides web content to online users who follow their search history. Before the user even performs a search, this software puts out recommended information. In other words, thanks to this software, users are able to find various subjects without even entering any keywords.

The new Discover can be described in three crucial shifts:

A shift from answers to journeys
A shift from queries to a query-less process of gathering information
A shift from text to an improved visual way of discovering data

Though the old Feed used to have a more of a textual design, the new improved version offers a wide range of a different kinds of content such as:

News stories
Photos/images
Videos
Newly published blog posts
Receipt materials
Evergreen content

As the Discover feed offers an opportunity to find new content and topic of your interest, here’s how it looks and functions:

The Feed is now personalised for mobile devices. You can customise your feed to show you only the content you are interested in. All you need to do is tap the header of any content you’re interested in. After that Google Discover will start showing you content relevant and related to the one you marked as interesting. You can also stop following topics if you’re no longer interested in them by tapping on the “More” button and finding the “Your data in Search” where you’ll be able to find your search history and delete the said topics.

8 Ways to Optimize for Google Discover

Now that we’ve covered the topic of what Google Discover is and how it works, let’s discuss content optimisation:

1. Strengthen Your Content Quality

Content is the most crucial element of digital marketing. Though you should be pretty consistent with the content you put out, that doesn’t mean you should publish just about anything. For example, you should probably avoid publishing tin content since it adds no value to your readers. Publishing these types of content will hardly ever give you any appearance on Google Discover and your readership will drastically go down. If your content doesn’t offer valuable and relevant information that your target audience is searching for, they will simply go to your competition.

So, when creating and publishing content, you should aim to deliver content that is relevant and useful to your audience. Rely on current statistics, marketing strategies, and trending data to find out what kind of content your target audience is looking for. Try to incorporate more long-tail keywords, high-quality photos, semantic keyword phrases, and illustrative graphics. All of these will help you optimise your content. Also, try to understand your users and their intent. What keywords are they likely to search online? This will help you strengthen your content.

Using this approach to strengthen your content will help you:

Increase blog reader’s time on page
Reduce bounce rates
Increase web traffic
Improve dwell time
Boost search ranking
Improve your chances of appearing on Google Discover

2. Use High-quality Visuals

The rebranded Google Discover pushes out the content with quality visuals so if you want to increase your content’s visibility you need to work on your visuals.

The two main factors that will get your content ranked high on searches are the quality of your materials and the link you create between the content and your readers. There are two things you should start doing if you want to get a higher ranking:

Publish interesting, engaging and high-quality content regularly
Utilise visuals such as photos, videos infographics, and graphics to optimise and amplify your content

In addition to that, start using large images instead of thumbnails. Why is this important? Well, according to Google, large photos perform so much better than thumbnails on Discover cards. Also, the statistics brought by Google show that:

Marketers increased time on page by 3%
Publishers achieved a 5% increase in click-through-rate (CTR)
They realized a 3% boost in user satisfaction too

3. Create Exciting Videos

Speaking of visuals, you should also find a way to utilise videos in your content since that format of visual content has been gaining a lot of attention. You should aim to create and deliver a wide range of different types of videos that will reach your target audience, make them engage with your content, and offer them helpful solutions to their problems. One idea would be for you to take a look at your top-performing blog posts and then make videos for them. These additional pieces of visual content will generate higher levels of social media engagement and boost your Google search ranking.

The following ideas may help inspire you:

Tutorials
Behind the scenes of your company
Demo videos for your services and/or products
Expert interviews
Case study videos

The goal is to present your small business to larger audiences and increase your brand awareness.

4. Observe Google’s Content Policies

In order to help your content get picked by Google Discover, your content needs to comply with its content policy. The Google guidelines contain “Search Quality Rating” which covers both “Needs Met (NM) ratings” and “Page Quality (PQ)”.

This means that your content needs to abide by these guidelines if you want your content to do well. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your content will end up on Google News, but it means that if your content ways examined by Discover and approved it has a chance of making it to Google News. So, make sure all of your content abides by these policies.

5. Tell Your Community to Add You

You’ll soon see that this software is remarkable and has many great capabilities. Did you know that this software lets you pick the sources of information that you can add to your collections? It also allows you to select any topic that interests you and follow it.

However, not all of your consumers may be familiar with this and they may not know they can add you to their topic of interest collections without you telling them about it first. For that reason, you need to communicate with your community and let them know that they can add you on Google Discover. Once they add you, they will be notified of every piece of content you put out there. Think of it like a call-to-action feature on your website.

6. Optimize for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)

Why is optimising for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages important? Well, AMP is amazing for helping you improve your website user experience (UX) and as you may already know one of the biggest factors for Google ranking is user experience. That is why Google developers designed AMP for better speed.

A web page with a high loading speed significantly improves UX and betters the consumer experience. If your website is not up to speed your search ranking will decrease as well as your chances of being picked by Google Discover.

For that reason, optimising for Google AMPS is very important. As a small business, you probably lack a team who will be able to take care of this kind of task. For that reason, teaming up with an expert SEO agency that has the expertise and an adequate understanding of SEO trends and strategies can help you optimise your website and content so that you will get better visibility and a higher ranking on search engines.

7. Publish Evergreen and Trendy Content Frequently

As it was already mentioned, Google Discover usually pushes out content that is fresh, new, evergreen, and relevant to the online users based on the search query. These results look into the user’s search history and help the users keep up with what’s currently trending in the industry.

Google Discover shows both the evergreen content and trending content that relate to your search. The best part about this is that it’s a win-win marketing strategy. When you publish relevant evergreen content, Discover will present it to your users on all relevant search results. As a result, you will increase web traffic on your page and increase your brand awareness. This will help you generate your target leads and increase your sales.

8. Conduct Competitor Research

Lastly, you should also keep up with your competition and regularly do research on them. Try to find out:

Why Google Discover is choosing to present your competitors’ content over yours
Why your content is not shown on the platform
What your competitors are doing differently t
What is making your competition’s content pop?

Examining your competition and the difference between your and their approach will help you not only better understand your content but also Google Discover. Most of the time examining the competition will help you see a different perspective and it will inspire you to try a new approach that will give you better results.

Conclusion

Overall, understanding Google Discover and how it works will help you gain larger web traffic, reach a wider audience, and generate more sales. If you own a small business and want to help it grow, these 8 steps are the most crucial things you need to know about Google Discover optimisation and how you should approach your own content to make it perform better on Google search results.

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by Nick Brown