Google Discover is one of those weird little Google features that I’d never really managed to wrap my head around until recently.
Apparently it has been a thing for much longer than I realised, originally released as Google Feed in 2017, then with the Discover featured officially being rolled out in September 2018.
And like most features that Google release these days, figuring out how to actually get your content featured in Google Discover is not as simple as you’d think. Google certainly don’t help much – they’ve said the intention of Google Discover is “to help you uncover fresh and interesting content about things that matter to you”. Kinda vague.
When I was researching for this post, I saw a lot of content talking about how to optimize for Google Discover. Search Engine Land put it as:
Brands will need to focus more on the quality of the content they produce as well as its audience engagement.
But I really don’t think that getting into Google Discover has anything to do with the quality of your content – a completely subjective concept anyway. What has worked for me twice over the past month is to use my niche subreddit approach to get a load of upvotes, comments and traffic from Reddit, then boom – my content pops up in Google Discover.
So what specifically was I doing on Reddit? It was pretty simple:
- Find a niche subreddit in a shoulder niche
- Tailor content that I know will be well received in that subreddit
- Wait for the upvotes, comments and traffic to roll in
Usually it took about 6-8 hours before something popped up in Google Discover:
Note – if you manage to get any content on Google Discover, a little ‘discover’ box will pop up on your Search Console and will stay there. It’s pretty cool actually, it feels like my Search Console has evolved (like when Charmeleon evolves into Charizard and suddenly sprouts wings).
Looking at the graph above, you’ll see that the content wasn’t exactly driving huge amounts of traffic, especially the second little blip. To be fair, that’s probably because it wasn’t particularly high quality (damn you Search Engine Land).
However, they both did manage to get into Google Discover, and they both managed to get almost 3k impressions together. So that’s pretty cool.
The content wasn’t particularly special, each post was literally about 200 words long and mostly text. A few other things to note:
- They both received less than 1000 upvotes
- They both received less than 25 comments
- They both had upvoted scores of 90% or higher (this might be key I think – less about quantity and more about % of upvotes vs downvotes)
If you want to try and replicate this yourself then let me know! I’ll certainly be trying it again (and I’ll be focusing more on quality this time, because that’s all we ever need to do in SEO right?).
