Google Discover, a newer Google initiative, streamlines content presentation for mobile users through the Google app. Although launched September of 2018, the app recently debuted some fairly important changes. These changes are helping to drive additional mobile traffic to optimized websites. In some cases, optimized websites see up to a 20% boost in google traffic. Google Discover has great reach at 800 million monthly users. Needless to say, it is worthwhile to keep an eye on developments from the giant, Google.
The newly redesigned feed and latest version of the app primarily focuses on evergreen content and news, with content rich in how-tos, photos, and videos. This is a dramatic change from the original, predominantly text-based news headlines, metatags, and the occasional photo.
In this article we will cover some of the strategies to get your content into the google discovery feed.
Optimize High-Quality Photos
Google’s new platform shows large, high-quality photos, accompanied by text copy, ensuring your text-based posts have a descriptive photo included, helping to provide Google with one of the necessary components needed to produce a ranked Google Discovery post. In order to optimize photos, include ALT tags, a text-based description of the photo. These are often missed, but serve a few purposes. It is best practice for SEO to utilize ALT tags, helping with image searches. They are even more important when ranking on Google Discovery. An additional criterion for image optimization, ensure you are using compressed files. The image will load quickly, while maintaining high quality resolution. JPEG is held as a classic format, however, two of the fastest loading compressed image files are WebP and HEIC. AVIF may be a contender in the coming months, but for now focus on using WebP and HEIC.
Post More Videos
Regardless, if you want to rank on Google Discovery, or not, this is sound advice.
We discuss will the importance of video in another article, you can read here. The important statistic, that should be noted, is 82% of all marketing web traffic is created with video. This is mainly due to the fact that video conveys more information with higher retention rates than text. Google adjusted their feed and app to reflect this growing trend. Google Discovery favors video, evergreen content, and highlights as the primary driving factors for visibility. For this reason, companies should produce and utilize various forms of videos to create diversity and an interesting and immersive environment in Google Discovery.
Mix Current and Evergreen Content
Google openly stated that they will display a mix of evergreen content and current content. This is because evergreen content can provide context for current content, helping to round out the new strategies and providing an enjoyable experience for the user. It also is important to develop a blend of the two for your own brand, showing your own users you are well grounded, while understanding the newest trends. Blending the two styles of content also builds backlinks and other forms of reference in your industry, giving your brand more bang for its buck.
Follow the Google News Guidelines
For a full list of Google guidelines and policies, click here. The general concept, Google expects compliance with guidelines to maintain integrity with the content supplied on Google Discovery. A few of the more important criteria:
Citing outside sources
Original content
Date the piece was published
Minimal ads in the article
Ensure transparency about the author of the piece
Mobile Optimized
Mobile optimization is a major factor for ensuring success on Google Discovery. The app is phone exclusive, one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. However, there is no data supporting the likelihood of showing up in the feed if you are mobile optimized. This has more to do with ensuring your audience is able to use your site.
Overall, the changes Google made to its Discovery app are an excellent opportunity to boost mobile traffic for your site. If you take the time to optimize a few areas of your content, you should start to see more mobile traffic coming from Google Discovery. You will start to see benefits because what the app prioritizes, is best practice SEO.
If you are looking for SEO or trying to get ranked for Google Discovery, contact Nesbit Marketing: www.nesbitmarketing.com/contact
or call: 231-360-0179