If you work in SEO, you know that we spend a lot of time analyzing how Google Search works and what steps we can take to improve our performance in the SERPs. Although no one knows for sure what goes into SERP rankings, the search engine giant sometimes gives us a peek behind the curtain that allows us to piece together some useful insights.
Google Discover on the other hand, is essentially a black box; it’s pretty difficult to understand exactly what metrics or performance indicators have an impact on how your articles perform in the Discover feed.
For the time being, Google isn’t doling out any specific advice on what you can do to get in Discover. However, there are ways to obtain some useful information:
- Talk to the experts: Those who work with Discover everyday have really interesting insights to share.
- Audit your site data: It’s one of the most reliable sources of information that can give you a glimpse at how things actually work and help you figure out what changes you can make to enhance your visibility.
Talk to the experts
Clara Soteras, SEO Consultant for News Publishers and Director of SEO and Product at El Nacional, sat down to talk to us about her experience with Google Discover.
Clara has significant expertise as a digital consultant for publishers and is well recognized in the SEO industry. She sits on the jury for the Global and European Search Awards and she serves as a Digital Advisor at AMIC, an association with more than 500 local publishers.
Sharing knowledge is important to Clara which is why she’s an adjunct professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, why she regularly speaks at conferences, congresses, and SEO events and why she agreed to speak to us.
She has garnered quite a bit of success when it comes to her Discover strategy and according to Clara:
“The most difficult thing in Google Discover is to start, to appear, and to have impressions in this channel. For me two of the most important [things to get right] are the headline and the photo.”
In our interview, Clara addresses some Discover fundamentals and how it differs from traditional search. She also shares what she has found to be the key factors that play a role in Discover rankings. Take a look at the full interview below.
Audit your data
Auditing your site data with Oncrawl can help you determine which of your
pages are showing up in Google Discover, how they’re performing, and how they break down across your site.
Google provides some basic guidelines regarding Discover, but auditing your performance can help you:
- Identify Discover traffic in analytics platforms;
- Understand how Discover and certain performance metrics are related and;
- Determine which specific metrics have an impact on your visibility.
Oncrawl supports Discover data as part of a technical SEO analysis. The ready-made dashboard report evaluates URLs featured on Discover as well as those that receive traffic from this source to help facilitate your analysis.
[Ebook] Auditing Google Discover with Oncrawl
If you’re interested in learning more about auditing Discover, you can take a look at one of our previous webinars with SEO experts, Jérôme Salomon, Senior Technical SEO at Oncrawl and Vivienne Goizet, Editorial Lead SEO at BILD.
In it, they take a detailed look at how to audit your site and what exactly you should focus on when it comes to your performance in Discover.
BILD x Oncrawl: How to perform the perfect Google Discover audit
Wrapping up
“Discover is bringing a huge amount of page views and content creators should be focusing our efforts there right now in light of the evolution of search. It’s our first channel of traffic nowadays in the majority of publishers.”
– Clara Soteras
Many news and media sites face several unique SEO challenges, but with the right tools and data, figuring out how to be visible in Discover no longer has to be one of them.
