Google Discover is a personalized content feed that delivers articles, videos, and other content based on a user's interests and search history. Discover surfaces content primarily based on what Google’s automated systems believe to be a good match with a user’s interests. The content in Discover is automatically refreshed as new content is published; however, it is designed to show all types of helpful content from across the web, not just newly published content.
Google Discover follows the same format as AI-driven social platforms like TikTok, in which an algorithm customizes a user’s feed to their interests.
How to Optimize for Google Discover
- Create unique, high-quality content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)
- Use page titles that capture the main topic of the content
- Utilize structured data, such as Article, NewsArticle and VideoObject to help Google better understand your content and demonstrate topical authority
- Content should contain high-quality videos and images and be enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting
Utilize the max-image-preview:large setting for Google Discover
- Add the following line of code into the <head> section of your page.
- This allows Google to show large images in Discover vs smaller thumbnails which can help increase CTR and impressions
<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large" />
- This allows Google to show large images in Discover vs smaller thumbnails which can help increase CTR and impressions
- Images need to be at least 1200 px wide
- Avoid using a site logo as your image
What Type of Content Appears in Google Discover?
While all types of sites can be optimized and appear within Google Discover, the following types of content are most relevant and important to optimize for Discover visibility:
- News and Publications: timely news and current events
- Educational and Informational: how-to guides and tutorials
- Blog and Lifestyle: Blog and lifestyle content focused on sports, travel, fashion, fitness, etc.
- E-commerce: supporting content related to products, such as buying guides
A study found that the majority of URLs in Google Discover only receive traffic for 3-4 days; most of that traffic takes place the first or second day after their publication.
Another study discovered that 46% of a sample size of Google Discover URLs were news sites and 44% were Ecommerce
How to Track & Report Google Discover Traffic
The best way to track and monitor your Google Discover traffic is by using Google Search Console (GSC). Within GSC you can find metrics by clicking on ‘Discover’ in the left hand navigation rail.
Google Discover traffic shows up as Direct Traffic in Google Analytics and is not as effective as using GSC.
Interested in Google Discover from a paid marketing perspective? Here's why you should be using "Discovery Ads".
Google Discover Performance Results
Results may vary by article but properly optimizing content is often always worth the results, especially if your site already generates Google Discover traffic and / or contains the content types listed earlier in this article. Below are results from some of Seer’s clients after optimizing content for Google Discover:
Client #1
Results: Client saw increase in clicks fairly quickly after optimizations were made
Client #2
Results: Client saw a major increase in impressions and nearly 3x increase in clicks
Expand and Improve your Google Discover Visibility
In summary, optimizing for Google Discover can help improve visibility for your content to a more curated and targeted audience. If you’re looking to expand or improve your performance, our technical and SEO teams can help!
