Google Discover: Unlocking the Future of Personalized Content

 

How people access content on mobile devices is changing

This is particularly true for people with Google accounts.

Rather than presuming a user’s interests and pushing out a feed of recent content, Google Discover takes a more personalized approach, suggesting even fewer, but better, content choices. It’s what some have called a “interest graph” instead of a “social graph.” For content creators, this is both a big opportunity and a big question mark. In this article, we’ll unpack the what, why, and how of Google Discover.

Google Discover and Its Functionality

Google Discover is part of the Google ecosystem—specifically tailored for mobile users—who it knows far too well. What they don’t know about you and me is what makes Google Discover so interesting. It’s a Content Recommendation Engine that operates fully in a proactive manner, surfacing what it believes to be fresh, unique, and engaging content that you might like to see based on your past behavior with Google Search and other interactions you’ve had with their apps and system.

How does Google Discover choose what to display? Google Discover selects what to display using a mix of machine learning and artificial intelligence to serve up personalized feeds for its users. Here’s a look at some of the basic parts of how it works: Interest insights and user signals. User data is collected from all of Google’s different services, like Search and YouTube, to get a pretty good sense of what individual users are into. This is the data foundation upon which all the personalized magic happens.

What Makes Evergreen Content Work in Discover?

Evergreen content can achieve comparable visibility to the recent, newsworthy, “hot topic”-type content you’re putting out. This is in part because of how long it stays relevant and useful. Evergreen content is relevant for much longer than timely content, and it’s this added relevance over time that gives evergreen content a big ranking boost and keeps driving traffic to it.

Why Is Google Discover Different From Search?

Google Search is a tool for finding information in response to user queries, but Google Discover does not need a user query to function. Instead, it presents users with information that is tailored to their interests and needs—and might they not even know they have. This makes Discover not just a different mode of using Google but also a different mode of using the web altogether.

Who Gains from Google Discover?

Profiting from Google Discover as a content creator, publisher, or marketer requires a good grasp of the platform’s idiosyncrasies and a nearly instinctual understanding of the Google way. In short, what gets you in can potentially get you out—if you’re good or if you’re bad at working the system.

As a primary opportunity for new readership, discover feeds are characterized by their rich visual nature and a design that encourages interactivity, especially on mobile devices. The editorial focus is much more about the visuals—high-quality images alongside eye-catching headlines—that entice clicks. And unlike on the social web, where user personalities come into play, discover feeds are much closer to a one-to-many publishing model.

Broaden Your Traffic Sources if You Rely on Search

Search engines, especially Google, tend to direct a lot of traffic to a website. But as we’ve seen, they aren’t the only game in town, and they’re not always the best game in town either. In 2020, for instance, 51.4% of the traffic to A List Apart came through search engines, which meant that 48.6% of our traffic was from other sources.

What to Think About When Using Discover

A Capricious Source of Traffic

Traffic from Google Discover is inherently unpredictable. Changes in users’ shifting interests or in the algorithms used by Google can produce some hefty ups and downs in the amount of traffic a site receives from this source—not necessarily reflective of the quality of the site’s content. Therefore, any traffic from Discover should be considered an enhancement to whatever strategy a site owner has for generating traffic, rather than as a mainstay of that strategy.

Guaranteeing Policy Adherence

The content policies that govern Google Discover often rule out materials such as petitions, forms, or overly sensational content. To avoid unexpected removal or subpar performance, it’s vital to grasp and work in harmony with the seemingly disparate governing policies.

What You Need to Do to Get Your Content in Google Discover

Being visible in Google Discover is more than just having good content. The Discover algorithm looks at a number of different factors, and you need to pay attention to all of them if you want a chance of being featured. For one, the content needs to be visually stunning. This is more important than it sounds, and it’s something a lot of content creators overlook.

Concentrate on Relevant, High-Caliber Content

Allocate Resources to Content That’s Crafted for Humans, Not Bots

When content is discovered, it should be engaging, pertinent, and trustworthy. You don’t just want your content to be found; you want it to be valued and utilized. Therein lies the crux of the matter: Creating for people, not for robots. Don’t write content that is just search engine-friendly—craft it to be genuinely interesting and useful to your intended audience.

Put First the Storytelling and Visual Media

Content that tells a story, includes compelling multimedia elements, and appeals emotionally or intellectually tends to perform better. Use large, high-quality images (at least 1200 pixels wide) together with descriptive captions and accurately cropped visuals to grab attention.

Get the Feed Readiness Right

Ensure Proper Indexing for Discovery

To show up in Google Discover, content first must be properly indexed by Google Search, and it’s got to be seen as valuable by both users and the search engine itself. This means your SEO basics—optimized meta tags, proper schema markup, and mobile-first usability—need to be in place and working as they should.

Guidelines for Metadata and Images

Eliminate any uncertainty in your metadata so that your feed can effortlessly understand your intent. Metadata such as `max-image-preview:large` can support you in achieving richer content. Don’t rely on visuals that are just logos or generic identifiers as your article’s “cover”—if you want your article to be engaged with, your visuals should aim for something more enticing.

Gauging Your Success with Google Discover to Refine Your Content Strategy

Understanding how well you are doing in Google Discover is key to optimizing your content strategy. If you wish to dig into your Discover performance, you will be happy to know that Google offers some excellent reporting features to help you do just that.

The Discover Performance Report within the Google Search Console presents a 16-month record of your key performance metrics, including the number of impressions and clicks. Even more useful, it illustrates your average Click-Through Rate (CTR) over the period of record. Using these insights, you can begin to understand how effective your content is in terms of its engagement with users.

What numbers should you track? Well, start with this setting: Metrics that indicate just how often your content makes an appearance. This includes impressions and coverage. Those are two key metrics, and here’s a look at them. Impressions and coverage: basically, the visibility of your content. Clicks: This is a metric that measures how often users are interacting with your article—are they clicking on it and entering into the feed? If you go a layer deeper and look at the ratio of clicks to impressions, you can start uncovering gold mines of insight that can help you be better at this job.

Dealing with Decreased Discover Traffic

If you see your traffic falling through Discover, take a close look to see if this is connected with Discover’s interests changing, your content being updated, or perhaps some other big shift in the algorithm that we probably won’t find out about for a while. Fluctuations are normal, but keeping an eye on all of this will help you avoid an actual case of “long tail” disengagement.

The Follow Function: An Extra Tool for Discovery

The Follow function enables subscribers to receive updates filtered directly from a website. In this way, an entity’s presence in the subscriber’s feed is not much different from its presence in the website’s Feed Reader. But this function is more than just a similar tool. It is a means by which brands can amplify their presence in the not-so-quiet Quiet Web. And to do that effectively, it needs RSS/Atom feeds.

Making RSS Feeds Work for You

To fully leverage this service, you should have the titles of your RSS feeds and the links per item be as descriptive and current as humanly possible. What you definitely do not want is an RSS feed that has the same name as the next RSS reader. This is because well-formed RSS or Atom feeds that Google can easily read divert the content toward the Follow mechanism Gmail uses.

Managing Numerous Feeds on a Single Domain

Websites that cover several unique topics, such as tech or lifestyle blogs, can utilize multiple feeds for better organization. Use the “ tag to give priority to feeds on pages that present a particular subject matter.

Using Social Media to Make Discover Content More Visible

Promoting Discover content and engaging with the audience is very much like on social media. It’s about digital presence. It’s about engagement. And the methods of doing these things overlap a good deal. So, what better way to get some insight into “how to be seen” on these platforms than by looking at a bevy of tools, one of which is WoopSocial?

WoopSocial makes it easy to manage your business’s presence on social media. Using its intuitive interface, you can schedule posts to go out on several platforms all at once. With some help from it, you could make a day, it could make a day, it could make a day.

To conclude, Google Discover offers a potent means of reaching and engaging an audience that is increasingly fragmenting across new digital spaces. Its potent combination of visuals and text provides a dynamic, immersive way for users to experience your content. And the growth of its audience base promises even greater opportunities to scale your visibility in the next phase of the internet, which increasingly seems to be favoring reach and engagement over narrow SEO optimizations.