A story of rags to riches in Google Discover.
The site is a news publisher in Australia. The SEO consulting project was split into 2 components:
1/ In-depth review/report
2/ Follow-up consulting
Here's how my client went from 100 clicks to almost 100,000 clicks in a day 👇
The site is a news publisher in Australia. The SEO consulting project was split into 2 components:
1/ In-depth review/report
2/ Follow-up consulting
Here's how my client went from 100 clicks to almost 100,000 clicks in a day 👇
1/ When it comes to Google Discover, there are several components that are important to focus on.
Much like optimising for Search, there is plenty of task focus overlap: the topics being written about, technical aspects, and the content itself.
Each are crucial for Discover.
Much like optimising for Search, there is plenty of task focus overlap: the topics being written about, technical aspects, and the content itself.
Each are crucial for Discover.
2/ For my client, the primary issues were with the technical aspects and the content itself. The topics that were being written about were Discover-worthy: the content was timely and considered to be interesting – with plenty of engagement in the comments section of posts.
3/ From a technical standpoint, there were a lot of issues uncovered in the initial review. Ranging from various Page Experience issues (shifts in particular), lack of Structured Data, broken elements on mobile, AMP issues, and lots more.
4/ The content itself was the biggest issue. Despite the technical factors holding the site back, that wasn't the sole reason for why Discover traffic had dropped off. It had a big part to do with the quality of content being uploaded and the feature images in particular.
5/ As a start, the site was copying large parts of text from other publishers and not adding enough value. Instances where up to 70% of the content on a page were from other sites was having a detrimental impact. This took a lot of work get the writers on the same page.
6/ Aside from the structural components of the articles (having a dot point summary at the top, an intro, using sub-headings, adding captions to images, concluding comments etc.). The feature images and the image being added to the og tags were a big problem.
7/ As shown in my flowchart, the feature images need to be large (at least 1200px wide), high quality, and engaging. None of this criteria was being met. And with Discover being a highly visual feed (it's literally the title/image that appears), this was a major issue.
8/ It's important to note that the initial consulting I provided for Discover didn't have an instant impact. The standard of implementation needed from review wasn't met. This is why follow-up assistance was provided with staff training which made all of the difference.
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