Content
Google Discover: Strategies for Access and SEO Impact
April 11, 2024
10 mins
Do you remember Google Feed? That's where the journey of the news feed that we now know as Google Discover begins. In 2018, the number of active users of the feed reached 800 million per month, after which it underwent a rebranding: changes in the interface, name, and content ranking conditions.
Although the channel is preferred by the media, large information and media resources, SEO specialists should not ignore it. Any site can and should apply for a Google Discover listing, as it provides the majority of organic traffic compared to organic search traffic from Google.
But how do you get into Google Discover if the feed is focused on interests rather than keywords? How will SEO work here and how exactly?
We asked Vladislav Trishkin, SEO Team Lead at Promodo, about this and what Google Discover Feed is and why your business should get there.
Google Discover is a feed with recommendations personalized for each user, which is displayed only on mobile devices.
Google Discover uses machine learning algorithms to analyze users' search history, online behavior, interests, and geolocation. Based on this, it creates a personalized feed of articles, news, videos, and other relevant content.
The bad news: you can't access Google Discover feed at will
Google decides what content to add to the Discover feed, from which sites and how much to take, what to show, how to change it, etc. This means that you cannot manipulate the Google Discover feed directly.
Google can add a site to this feed, or it can not show the site in this feed at all - it is completely indifferent to any kind of manipulation by SEO, because it manages its recommendations on its own.
Vladislav Trishkin
SEO Team Lead @Promodo
But the good news is that you can get into the Google Discover feed if you work hard on organic search.
Despite the fact that the feed has similar requirements for website optimization as organic, it is a separate channel and recommendation feed that users see after entering search queries. The channel is related to organic because:
For website owners, Google Discover offers an additional source of traffic. The feed recommends their content to interested users, potentially converting them into subscribers or customers, which leads to increased traffic and conversions.
What makes Google Discover different from organic? A tendency to make spikes that are not typical for organic.
Yes, sometimes Google Discover experiences abnormal traffic spikes that we don't see in organic, but the reasons are unknown. This may be due to E-E-A-T factors, because I see the most changes on their core updates to Discover. That is, a site that did not receive traffic from Discover before may start receiving it from there after a core update or vice versa.
Vladislav Trishkin
SEO Team Lead @Promodo
In order for a website to get into Google Discover and improve its position, you need a classic primary technical SEO optimization to make the site meet the modern requirements of search engines.
How to do it? Make sure to focus on E-E-A-T factors as much as possible.
This is extremely important for the Discover feed. Google needs high-quality expert content from trusted sources and will pull relevant content from relevant sites.
So, in addition to Google Discover, you should definitely work on organic.
The more traffic you have on your website, the more traffic you have on your website - this is the pattern. That is, the more you work on organic, the more traffic you get from there, and the easier it is to work with the site in the future. For Google, this means a certain level of trust in a website that protects the interests of users.
Vladislav Trishkin
SEO Team Lead @Promodo
After technical optimization and audit, you need to focus on content and recommendations - which direction is better to write articles in, how to write them, and what to write (not only with organic search in mind, but also with Google Discover).
Google Discover mainly displays four types of content:
Links to online articles from various publishers. Each link to an article is displayed as a card that contains a title and a thumbnail image.
This format combines video, images, and audio - similar to an Instagram story.
A user's Google Discover feed can also include YouTube videos and shorts that are recommended based on the user's YouTube history.
Ads created through Google Discover campaigns also appear in the feed from time to time.
eCommerce is very rarely included in Discover. The preference is given to large news or niche sites that generate, firstly, a huge amount of news, and secondly, a considerable number of cool articles that users like. They also include articles by interests.
Google Discover for media mostly accounts for the vast majority of traffic, as it usually brings in much more than organic. For example, organic brings in 20 million clicks per month, while Google Discover can bring in 80+ million clicks.
To measure the success of your efforts, you can use Google Discover analytics - Google Search Console (Recommendations report). This will allow you to find out how often your content is displayed in the feed, how often users click through to your site, and which content is the most popular.
By regularly analyzing your metrics, you will be able to see what works and what doesn't. This will allow you to adjust your strategy and optimize your content to achieve the best results.
The Google Search Console (Recommendations report) provides several statistics and metrics that you can use to track your performance:
The number of times your content has been shown in the Google Discover feed.
The number of times users click through to your website from Google Discover.
The percentage of users who clicked through to your website out of the number of impressions. But the main thing is that it allows you to get statistics on clicks on certain articles/news that have been included in the recommendation feed. This helps you analyze the topics and areas of interest to your audience.
Our client, a Ukrainian news agency, is one of the best examples of cases using the Google Discover channel.
The project had three main areas of focus:
Additionally, we tracked the topics of articles and news that were included in the recommendation feed. This allowed us to adjust the content strategy.
1. September 2023 - 20 million
2. October 2023 - 23.3 million
3. November 2023 - 31.9 million
4. December 2023 - 35.8 million
5. January 2024 - 36.5 million
As a result, we see an increase in traffic from the Google Discover channel.
Media is monetized through advertising. If a site receives a lot of traffic from Discover, it helps the monetization model for large media. The greater the coverage, the larger the audience, the more advertising costs, and the more popular a particular media is.
Regardless of the monetization model, in large media, it is always related to audience reach. Therefore, an additional source of traffic like Google Discover can significantly increase a company's profits.
Vladislav Trishkin
SEO Team Lead @Promodo
There is very little information on how to work with the Google Discover feed, how to get there from a media site, and how to drive traffic from a media site. It's best to have a specialist with media experience work on this.
Media is a specific type of website that not every SEO specialist has experience with, let alone with the Google Discover feed. So it's very difficult to find a specialist who specializes in this and has practical experience with media and the Discover feed.
As for traffic from Google Discover, we advise you to be careful. Using the "do not work with organic" tactic can lead to the loss of traffic from the recommendation feed after one of the Google Core Updates.
The recommended strategy is to adopt a two-pronged approach to content - one section is optimized for users who are actively searching for specific topics, and the other section is tailored to the emotional interests and trends of your target audience, which is consistent with Discover's model for content discovery.
In summary, while Discover provides opportunities to increase traffic, the key is to protect your overall SEO integrity. Treat it as a standalone platform and consider a solid content strategy that balances search engine optimization with emotional resonance with your audience.
SEO Team Lead at Promodo
Vladyslav has been working as SEO Specialist for over 5 years.His portfolio of projects includes: Ukr.net, Sinoptik, Concert.ua, etc.
He is a fan of Ahrefs, enjoys reading Google's Assessor's Guide, and is always ready to have a discussion about SEO.His main specialization is promoting content and media projects, and he has numerous successful case studies.
Beneficial link on Vladyslav's expertise:
1. https://www.youtube.com/live/2hGEmklt7ZM?feature=share
2. https://www.education.ua/trainings/trainers/20215/
3. https://wordfactory.ua/4-stati-ot-wordfactory-o-faktore-avtorstva-dlya-ranzhirovaniya-ymyl-sajtax/
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