You may not know what it is called, but surely you have used it and that as soon as you read the explanation you will immediately understand what Google Discover is.
If you have the Google Chrome application on your mobile, you will see that below the search engine you will see, arbitrarily, news from various sectors and of different types: it is Google Discover, and in this article we will see why it is key to know it to improve your results in terms of traffic.
What is Google Discover?
We have already introduced it, but let’s see it in detail. We can define Google Discover as the social version of Google, since it is still a news feed adapted to your tastes, your previous searches and your interests.
Therefore, it is as if you were scrolling on the Facebook home page, but on Google.
In fact, under each news you have buttons that give you the option to adjust the content to your interests. It is easy to do it and, in addition, you can indicate whether you want to see more content of a certain type or less.
With the Google Discover personalization option you can manage your interests to indicate directly to Google what interests you , giving it an order to hide certain topics that are not of interest to you.
Also read: Customize what you find in Discover
Google Discover, Google+ and Google News: They are not the same
Those who understand what Google Discover is, as a tool, know that it is very powerful at the level of data collected by Google . Thanks to the freedom of configuration that is given to the user, it is possible to obtain a lot of information about their interests. There is also valuable feedback about user engagement with certain news.
However, it is difficult to know how many users are editing their preferences here and narrowing down their interests. They may not be as many as you might expect. That is why it is convenient to see if it will end up being another Google+ and will fall into oblivion. Although we hope that it is not like that and that finally Google has known how to create its own more social version.
It would be expected, since, for users, the added value may lie in the fact that while in a traditional social media many content they see appears because they have liked their friends or people they follow, here 100% of what shown is personalized based on your own tastes, interests and searches.
But the question may arise: and then how does it differ from Google News? The difference is that News, as the name suggests, shows you news and trends from the last hours and, at most, days, but in Google Discover, in addition to content from the last days, it is possible to see results of older articles .
The reason is that, as we have just explained, what matters is your interest in terms of user and if something may be relevant to you . And even if it was published a year ago, Google will show it to you on Google Discover.
We talk about articles because it is the most common content, but in Discover it can also appear videos, match results or event information, such as movies in theaters and music festivals, among others.
Are you starting to see its potential? Let’s see in detail how you can access Google Discover results with your blog.
Also read: Change your Discover settings
How to position yourself on Google Discover?
As always in the Google environment, positioning depends on an algorithm, and whoever understands what Google Discover is can imagine that this application is no exception.
However, what prevails here is the interest of the user. Therefore, as content creators, we have to put the focus on creating quality content. Pieces of text or audiovisual creations that give answers to the pains and the concerns of those who access the search engine.
Not many years ago, it was still more or less easy to get a position in Google even with poor quality content that did keyword stuffing or used other practices that are now “frowned upon” by Google. But now, more and more , quality content becomes very important as a positioning criterion.
In the next section, we will see how to optimize articles so that your content appears in the Google Discover feed of your target audience.
How to Optimize Articles for Google Discover Traffic: 10 Strategies
As we have seen, in Google Discover it is not exact to talk about positioning. To focus on the subject with precision, we should refer to the suitability with which it is able to fit in the searches and interests of the user, since everything depends on them.
However, there are some points that are essential to take into account in order to have a better chance of appearing in prominent positions. I tell you 10 positioning strategies in Google Discover :
- Work very well on SEO and semantic SEO so that Google can relate the contents well and return relevant results for users
- Create interesting and useful content that is trending, but also Evergreen, updating it when things change . It makes sense, since older results can also appear in Google Discover, if Google thinks they are relevant to the user.
- Make sure you respect Google’s publishing rules , it never hurts to go over them.
- Look for engagement. For this, it is convenient to check that those posts that guarantee good performance in terms of engagement are well optimized (low bounce rate, longer time on page, greater comments, etc.).
- RSS learnings and insights . Just as important as understanding what Google Discover is and how it works is reviewing which articles work best on social media. The more successful it is, the more likely it is to appear in the user’s personalized feed.
- Mobile friendly. Yes, the priorities are already clear : mobile first; but this statement still carries more weight in this section of Google, which was born with the mobile environment in mind.
- Have content in AMP . Did you imagine that the vast majority of the content shown in this section is AMP?
- Images. Unlike generic positioning in Google, we have to think of Google Discover as a social medium, therefore, images play a fundamental role in making one content more attractive than another. Following Google’s guidelines, keep images with a length of at least 1200 px increasing the chance of appearing in the Google Discover feed by 5%.
- Get to know your buyer persona and create relevant articles for your audience. Doing so ensures you are more likely to appear here.
- Quality, quality, quality. We have already said it: quality! As a last tip, since it repeats variant , never lose sight of the quality of your content and try to respond to the user’s search intention.
If you follow the Inbound marketing blog , you will see that some points of the positioning in Google Discover coincide with a good content and SEO strategy . In the end … everything is within Google!
How to analyze the results of Google Discover?
The monitoring and analysis of the traffic data that reaches your website allows you to perfect your strategy and gain alignment with your marketing objectives. To analyze the traffic coming from Google Discover, you can use Google Search Console. In this application you will see:
- How much traffic you got from Google Discover.
- How many times is your site showing up on Google Discover.
- How your pages are performing, if you compare them with traditional traffic performance (SEO).
- What content is appearing on Google Discover.
- What content is trending, what users like, what content your followers choose in networks and what your buyer persona… In short, you can access interesting insights.
Keep in mind that if you don’t see the Google Discover report, your site isn’t showing. As Google himself explains, the Discover performance report is only available for sites that have exceeded a certain number of impressions (it does not specify how many) in the last 16 months.
It should also be taken into account that the traffic from Google Discover is not as stable as SEO, since it usually has the appearance of traffic peaks that are limited to 48-72 hours, although it can be repeated in time to the same content.
So you should not be surprised to see a Google Discover graph with great variations (in this aspect it is where it most resembles Social Media traffic, where it is more common to see peaks depending on the content we have published).
We have seen that Google Discover may not be a channel that can be worked as thoroughly and with as many strategies as, for example, SEO. But, with this tool, Google shows once again to what extent the quality of the content is taken into account , that it is truly relevant for the user and that it can answer their pain, even long after publication.
Are you already clear about what Google Discover is and how to work it to increase conversion? Leave me your questions in the comments section!
