2. Understand topical authority: key words and entities
Google has been talking about topical authority for a long time, and in Discover it’s completely relevant. Traditional SEO involves using keywords to position your web pages for a specific search, but the content strategy in Discover should be based on entities, i.e. concepts, characters, places, topics… everything that a Knowledge Panel can have. You need to know which topics Google believes we have the most authority and relevance to be able to talk about.
3. Avoid clickbait in headlines
“Use page titles that capture the essence of the content, but in a non-clickbait way.” This is the opening sentence that describes what titles should look like in Google’s documentation. I always say that it’s not about using clickbait but about a little creativity on the journalist’s part. Generating a good H1 is also part of the content creation work.
Google also adds:
“Avoid tactics to artificially increase engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (headline, snippets or images) to increase appeal or withholding crucial information needed to understand what the content is about.”
“Avoid tactics that manipulate attractiveness by satisfying morbid curiosity, excitement or indignation.
Provide timely content for current interests, tell a story well, or provide unique insights.”
Do you think this information matches what you see every day on Google Discover? I imagine there were a lot of sites that didn’t comply with this and were getting a lot of traffic from Discover.
With the latest core updates in 2023, Google has been extremely harsh on news sites and some niches with Discover-focused content, directly impacting EEAT. The impact was so severe that many publishers shared the drastic drops in Search Console with expert Lily Ray, who wrote an article with data from over 150 publishers.
4. Images are important
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If you look at your Discover feed, you’ll see that most of the images catch your attention. They are detailed shots of delicious foods, close-ups of a person’s face showing emotions, or even images in which the character in question does not appear, such as “the new manicure that will be trending in 2024”, convincing you to click.
Google documentation recommends adding “high-quality images in your content, especially large images that are more likely to generate visits from Discover” and takes note of important technical requirements such as images that must be “at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting.“ You may also have discovered that media outlets create their own collages to have images that stand out from the competition.