The battle for the top spots on SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) is fierce and getting fiercer. The beauty of Google Discover is that it confirms everything we've been teaching you for years about discoverability: It's all about the Quality of your content. To this end, we share our know-how with you.
What is Google Discover?
Google Discover is an extended and renamed Google feed. A feature of the application software that allows users to share content suggests based on your previous Google searches. The more often someone uses the software, the better Google understands the concern of what the User experience can improve. Google Discover also recommends a mix of content types, including evergreen content, news, and more.
Google Discover recommends preferred visual content materials such as videos. This is not surprising, since Video content has long been considered the "content of the future," as YouTube impressively proves.
With Google Discover, the search engine is also breaking new ground visually, as it moves away from a text-based layout to a fresh look. For this purpose catchy headlines and additional functions such as "Discover" and "Follow" can be used.
Google Discover is not Google News, but displays content that matters without having to do a search.
Now it's clear why your content should absolutely be designed to appear in this feed. This is not necessarily about creating new content all the time, quite the opposite. On Google Discover, as valuable contributions displayed regardless of the publication date.
How to optimize your content for the Google Discover Feed
Optimize your website for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) are very good for your SEO. Why? Because they Designed for speed are, which are a decisive factor for Google ranking. AMPs load almost instantly, giving users a seamless, fun website user experience across all devices, including desktop.
The faster your pages load, the more it contributes to user satisfaction. In other words, if your web pages load slowly, it reduces your chances of ranking in the SERPs. Also, your prospect of being picked up by Google Discover becomes low.
Produce outstanding blog content
Google Discover doesn't randomly select content to show users. Instead, it searches for high-quality, meaningful content. If you have difficulty creating engaging content, you can outsource the task and hire an agency or freelance writers to do it.
Always ensure a clear structure so that people can easily find their way around your website.
Use high quality visuals
Creating high-quality content is not only about the texts, but also about the Visual aspect. Remember that Google Discover puts more emphasis on visual elements like videos. Basically, it's about enriching premium content with visual details. Either one is not enough to convince Google!
Don't use images of any size in your content. Instead, your images should be at least 1,200 px wide. Why? The search engine giant mentioned that larger images generate better results on Discover.
Build trustworthiness
How can you create credible content? Use social media to build trust. Social media places a lot of emphasis on the trustworthiness of your content. To develop this trust factor, get people to share your posts across all channels. The social signals you collect, like likes, comments, and shares, add up to improve your SEO.
The more others share, comment and like your posts, the more social signals you generate that improve your popularity and rank your content higher.
In the end it increases the Trustworthiness of your content and also makes Google aware of it. It recognizes that your content is great, which effectively increases your eligibility to be displayed in the Discover feed.
However, keep in mind that users will only share your posts if you publish outstanding content. For example, Facebook ranks only high-quality content since its algorithm update. Also, develop a stable Link building strategyto get relevant backlinks from authority websites in your niche. The links you get back to your website also help increase your trustworthiness.
Follow the best practices for SEO
Following basic SEO rules is one of the best ways to get noticed by Google Discover. Why? Because it helps improve user experience and your SEO strategy.
What SEO rules can you follow? Simple, optimize your posts and your website with SEO best practices.
- Improve website speed.
- Make sure your blog or website is mobile responsive.
- Secure your website with a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate.
With the Google Discover app users can determine which brands and content topics you want to follow. However, your audience may not follow you if you don't tell them. Therefore, the best way to get people to follow you is to ask them to add your blog to Google Discover. As a result, Google notifies them when the app picks a new blog content from your website.
Make sure that your web pages can be crawled
A crucial aspect of SEO is letting Google know what your pages represent, the Relevance of the contents and more. But without Google crawling and indexing your pages, your chances of showing up in search queries decrease. Therefore, make sure your pages are easy to crawl and let Google index your web pages. This is an essential step to appearing on Google Discover.
There are several steps you can take to help Google index your pages faster. One tactic is to create a XML Sitemap for your website pages.
Follow the guidelines for publishing content
Google explained that following the terms and guidelines for publishing blog content is critical if you want to appear in the Discover Feed. This means that your blog posts and other content types must meet the Google News Guidelines and the Google Guidelines for webmasters must comply. Why is that? Google consistently strives to improve the user experience by helping searchers find valuable content from blogs and websites.
