Optimizing your content for Google Discover

Do you know that you can try to optimize your content for Google Discover?

Hello, thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

I recently read a new set of research on Google Discover. Google Discover is the feature on Android phones which presents personalized content to a user without them searching. The Search Engine Land article covered which industries are benefiting from Google Discover exposure.

Here are my notes from the article:

Based on the Google Announcement about Discover, there are two ways that Google determines which content to display in Google Discover:

1. Using Google News AI/ML to bring a variety of perspectives on the latest news.
2. Using the Topic Layer in the Knowledge Graph to understand user interests and how they progress over time.

Users can also provide direct feedback to further customize their feed by following or unfollowing topics, selecting “show more” or “show less”, and choosing not to see content from certain publishers.

Here are the takeaways:

1. Click through rate across industries in Google Discover is 11%. The average CTR for traditional search is 4%.
2. Discover impressions (in Google Search Console) are only recorded when a Discover card is scrolled into view, while Google search impressions are recorded for a URL when a user sees a search result page that includes the URL. This means that Discover impressions are a bit more accurate.
3. The study also found that most URLs only received traffic for 3-4 days, and most of that traffic occurred 1-2 days after publishing. However, a caveat here. I have access to Google Discover data for federal .gov websites and I have seen their evergreen content surfaced well after when it was published (currently one has a 2019 published article surfaced in Discover).

So how should you capitalize on this trend?

1. Be mobile-friendly and include high-quality images – at least 1,200 pixels wide.
2. Interest-based content is personalized, so write content that will resonate with your most passionate users. This means that you really need to know your users. And you should really be tying your content to current events if you can.
3. Optimize your video assets and add them to your newly created for Discover content.
4. Monitor your success and keep in mind that Google Discover is measured as Direct traffic in your Google Analytics.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.