Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of.
- [00:40]
Jordan Cooney
Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Lily Ray, who is the VP of SEO Strategy and Research at amsib, which specializes in providing innovative digital marketing solutions to help businesses enhance their online presence and reach their target audience effectively. With a focus on data driven strategies and cutting edge technology, Amsive offers a wide range of services tailored to meet each client's unique needs. Yesterday, Lily and I talked about the future of search. Today we're going to continue our conversation by discussing Google Discover.
- [01:21]
Sponsor Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most link to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT okay.
- [02:41]
Jordan Cooney
Here'S my conversation with Lily Ray, the VP of SEO Strategy and Research at amsiv. Lily, welcome back to the Voice of Search Podcast.
- [02:49]
Lily Ray
Thanks again for having me.
- [02:51]
Jordan Cooney
So Yesterday we had an exciting conversation just where is search going? How AI is really changing the landscape, not just of Google, but just in the overall search expectations, how this is going to affect data and the data that we have. It honestly was a phenomenal episode. So if anyone didn't get a chance to listen, please go back to yesterday's episode. It truly is a recap of the roller Coaster year of 2024 and a view into some of the expectations that we should have as we move into 2025 and look at the future of search. But for today, we're talking about Google Discover. And I want to start off by just talking about what Google Discover is and maybe if you could share a little bit about, like, where Google Discover has gone over this past year. Like what. What's happened with that as. As an experience in Google.
- [03:47]
Lily Ray
Yeah. So Google Discover is a form of what Google calls like query less search, which means that it serves you content based on your interests without you having to type in any query, unlike actual Google search. And it's available in different places on Android devices, kind of built into the interface as well as when you're going to google.com, you can see a list of articles under that search bar on mobile, and that's your Google Discover feed. If you're on iPhones, you have to use the Google Chrome app to basically, or the Google app to search directly on Google. And you'll see a feed of articles underneath the search bar that are associated to your Gmail account or your Google account. So it's 100% personalized. It's 100% based on your interests, your location, your previous search history, and probably many other data points that we don't exactly know where Google's pulling from. But I think that they use everything, I think they could use things like Gmail conversations and receipts from E commerce stores and things like this. So they're building a profile about who you are and what content you might be interested in, and then Google Discover serves you that content. So when we're doing basically SEO for Google Discover at our agency, we do like Google Discover consulting and Google Discover audits. It's quite different than SEO because we're not thinking so much about keywords, we're thinking about topics that people are interested in as well as entities that people are interested in. So you're only able to see Google Discover data through your search console account, and only if your site has Discover data. Not every site has it. So you'll know when you log into Google Search Console if you see on the left, you'll see something called performance. That's your search performance. Underneath it, you'll see Discover only if you've received a sufficient amount of Discover impressions or clicks to appear there. So not every site has it. The reason why our team is so obsessed with it is because we have dozens, if not hundreds of clients that get lots of Discover data. So we do a lot of exercises to kind of aggregate that data and get a good understanding of what's happening in Discover.
- [05:54]
Jordan Cooney
Can I ask you a really strange maybe off the cuff question? Is Google Discover the creepiest product Google has?
- [06:01]
Lily Ray
That's a good question.
- [06:02]
Jordan Cooney
In search, to be more specific.
- [06:05]
Lily Ray
Maybe. I think it has the potential to be. It's actually funny to me because sometimes, sometimes I wish Discover was more creepy. Like, you know how on Instagram or Facebook or whatever, like you'll talk about something and you'll get an ad five seconds later? Yes. Like, I almost want that to happen in Discover because for me, my, my, I'm on an iPhone, my Discover feed, and of course I'm always doing SEO for a hundred clients at the same time. So like I'm seeing all this stuff in my Discover feed that's like, I'm not interested in that. I just, you know, But I wish they did a better job of truly understanding who I am and serving me creepy ads. So it's hard to say whether that's the creepiest. I think Google probably does more creepy things, but it has the potential to be. So I understand why you asked that question.
- [06:45]
Jordan Cooney
Okay, all right, fair enough. So as it pertains to Google Discover, I mean, obviously this has for maybe the folks who are listening and aren't super familiar with Discover. Right. Because it really is a subset of websites and content that truly leverage it. Can you share a little bit about the kind of impact it can have on a website?
- [07:06]
Lily Ray
Yeah, definitely. This is something that's really interesting because as I mentioned before, you're not going to know what is possible in there unless you start to see the Search Console data. For some sites, I would say relatively small subset of sites that get a lot of traffic from there. And we have a number of different clients that you can see the breakdown of search versus Discover traffic. When you go directly into Search Console when you log in, there's going to be this report that shows search performance and Discover performance and you can see the percentage of Google traffic that you're getting from either report. We have clients that get 90% Discover traffic and 10% search traffic. That's a very different type of website than a site that does the opposite, like 90% search, which I think we're all probably a lot more familiar with. Sites that get a lot of traffic from SEO. The sites that get a lot of traffic from Discover could see and have seen. You know, we've seen this in our data many times. You can get let's say 1 to 4 million clicks in one day from one article in Discover. Now that's the upper, upper, upper echelon, but that's possible. And it's not only the biggest sites on the Internet that do that. There are a lot of mid size or small publishers that can get a million clicks a day in Discover. So especially for sites that are hurting with Google algorithm updates that are not seeing the traffic that they used to, this can be a really big opportunity for those sites.
- [08:30]
Jordan Cooney
Now I mean, and I know this is kind of a tricky question, but it's I think important for our listeners to understand like with respect to Google Discover, are there levers to really unlock growth there or are you at the whim of consumer trends and organically like people looking for these things or engaging with these topics, quote, unquote?
- [08:57]
Lily Ray
Yeah, I mean Google would tell you and has told me verbatim, there's no way to optimize for Google Discover because it's just like you just said, it's just based on what's happening in the world. It's based on people's unique interests and things like this. I would counter that because we quite literally do this for clients with a lot of success and many other people do, there's absolutely ways to optimize for it, but you have to be really thinking on your toes a lot of the time. You know, um, it's true that like a lot of the best success you're gonna see in there usually comes from content that's very timely in nature. You know, today's the election, there's going to be a lot of sites that get 4 million clicks for one article. Yeah, if it's the super bowl, same thing. If Taylor Swift has a performance, same thing. But if you are one of those sites, who knows? We have seen performance in Google Discover for Taylor Swift before. Today is a big day. How are we going to produce content in a way that we know it's going to do well in discovery? And yeah, not everything is going to knock it out of the park, but once you start to comb through your own data and understand those patterns and understand the potential for your site to appear there, there's Absolutely. Levers that you can pull in ways that you can optimize for it.
- [10:08]
Jordan Cooney
And this leads me to my next question, which is like, you gave some examples that are quite significant in scale, right? I mean, Taylor Swift, super bowl, these are iconic type events. But I get a sense that Google Discover, in its genuine purpose and intent, has also real material benefit and impact at much more local and niche communities. You know, and I think that if Google really wants to make this a real product for the future, they have to be more vigilant about those types of communities. How have you seen that materialize for brands that aren't necessarily trying to reach a mass audience, but are trying to talk to a direct community, a real neighborhood, an area in a city or a market? You know, websites that are truly trying to connect with a specific audience or an interest group. Has Google Discover been a lever in those scenarios?
- [11:08]
Lily Ray
Yeah, 100%. And you asked before about like, how it's changed this year. One of the big changes that Google has implemented is they serve Discover content in a way that's very closely tied to your recent search history and also like locations that you are either searching for or you visited. And I know this because I travel the world to speak at SEO conferences and when I land in a new place, it tells me, here's the top things to do in the city that you just landed in. Right. Or it shows me content from local publishers in that region. So it does give sites a bit of a competitive advantage if they are super focused on like local information or super niche information. Um, there's another example I can think of where like, you know, if you're really into, let's say like World of Warcraft and Google kind of pins you as that audience. It's obviously a very niche audience, but there's a lot of sites and publishers that are really focused on just that topic. You'll see that topic a lot in your Discover feed, if that's, if that's something that Google's like, this is something that they love. You know, it's a, it's a topic that this person is really interested in. So you're going to get a lot of that content and, and in some cases that's going to be content where that didn't necessarily perform as well in search. Maybe you can't compete with fandom.com, right? They're a huge publisher in SEO. But if you have something about. Here's my review of the latest World of Warcraft game. I don't actually play World of Warcraft. So I don't know what people write about, but something that's new and timely and interested for that niche audience, it definitely gives you a lot more potential to compete in there.
- [12:39]
Sponsor Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You could pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you could work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategyless project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Pre Visible IO that's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E.
- [14:08]
Jordan Cooney
Love it. And I and I and I really hope that that is a continuation of where Google Discover goes. I mean, personally I think if Google really wants to make this a product that adds value to humanity, it needs to happen not on the Taylor Swift level, but in the local indie level, in my city or wherever I am.
- [14:25]
Lily Ray
Yeah.
- [14:26]
Jordan Cooney
So you know, as it pertains to optimizing for this, you know you mentioned the conflicting messages from Google about whether or not you can optimize for Google Discover.
- [14:35]
Lily Ray
Yeah.
- [14:35]
Jordan Cooney
But over the years, what have you learned about optimizing for Google Discover? What, what works or what, what should be? What should our listeners be mindful of when it comes to focusing on Google Discover and making your website effective for that source of traffic?
- [14:49]
Lily Ray
Yeah, so many things. And it's always a little bit tricky for me to talk about because Google Discover is a bit like the wild, wild west of SEO that we had 10 years ago. So there's more ways that you can directly influence it. And I sometimes am reserved about talking about that because I don't want people to hear it.
- [15:07]
Jordan Cooney
Fair enough.
- [15:07]
Lily Ray
So I try to be careful with the things that I talk about, but I will share, number one is to understand your own data. The best source of truth for Google Discover is to see what has worked for your site before and to double down on that. So that's understanding. Like I mentioned before, there's often patterns that you can see in your own data. Like, oh, every time we write about horoscopes, it does well in Discover, you know, maybe for a site that writes about a bunch of different topics. But when you look at the Discover data, you're going to see it's almost always the horoscopes. And then you can kind of see is there a specific headline structure that we used for horoscope content that's really engaging with our users? Because the most important, I would say the most important metric in Discover is click through rate. You know, you have one chance if you're appearing in there, if you have one impression, you want to get that click. Because the more you get that click, the more they're going to continue to serve your content. The more that you have low click through rates and low engagement, the more likely it is that Google's going to say, you know what, this whole site doesn't do well in there. That's going to, we're going to take them out. Because one thing you can see very happen very often in Discover is Google removes the whole site. Whether that's overnight, which can happen at any day, unfortunately, or often with a core update, they'll just remove the whole site. I can't tell you how many messages I get from people that are like, hey Lily, I had 8 million clicks in Discover last month and this month I have zero. That happens a lot. And I think that's one of the reasons why Google tells us we can't optimize for it and we shouldn't rely on it because that is so common. Another big reason for why you might see such a dramatic drop is because your content is getting into risky territory. Think of Discover as a family friendly product with search. There's something called safe search. When you type an adult keyword or a not safe for work keyword. Google will often say, do you want to see safe search results? Do you want to see blurred results? Do you want to see all the results or do you want to see filtered results that are basically like family friendly? Google Discover is always family friendly. By default. If you are producing too much content that would be filtered by SafeSearch, they also might remove your entire site. And we see this happen so often, even when publishers don't mean to do it. And the last thing I'll add is images, headlines and images are the two most important factors in Discover I mentioned you only have one chance. That chance hinges on what's the headline that's being shown and what's the image that's being shown. So there's a lot of AB testing that you can do with those two elements.
- [17:26]
Jordan Cooney
Love it. Thank you for that. I think it's immensely valuable and I don't think a lot of people talk about Google Discover in that way. You know, starting with the core foundation of looking at your own data, looking at what is working with your site, if you've had success there, and then all the way to the core functional assets like the headlines and images. I want to segue to what might be my last question on this episode, because I think it's a big, broad question and I think it materially is important to all SEOs who are listening to this and anyone who's in the content space, editorial or otherwise, and looking at Google Discover as a channel or has already recognized it as a critical channel to their business. And that is, what's the value of this traffic? Is it really useful? Does it actually help us generate revenue or grow our audiences? Is it the traffic we want? Is ultimately a big question that I think many of us should try to understand and better comprehend when it comes to working with our clients and our brands around Google Discover. And I'd love your perspective on that, Lily.
- [18:29]
Lily Ray
Yeah, that's a great question. And it totally boils down to how the website makes money and how your brand makes money. I think a lot of the publishers, the biggest publishers on Google Discover are just focused on traffic and page views. So the answer to that question for them is obviously yes. However, as I mentioned before, if you are too obsessed with Discover traffic, it can put you at a state of mind where you're like, let's just churn out more and more and more. Problem with that is if the engagement's not good in Discover, you can lose it really quickly and it's very hard to get it back. Or this is even more tricky. It can hurt your SEO performance, so you have to do it in a really delicate way. But yeah, if you're a publisher that makes money from page views, discovery traffic is great. If you are a small business, I don't know that it should be the key focus, but it's absolutely a great Way to drive a lot of upper funnel traffic really quickly. And you could do like one really great piece of content that really does add a lot of value for your users and for your readers. And that could get a million clicks in Discover, and maybe that sends a ton of new eyeballs to your business, but maybe you just need to do that once a month. So it really depends on how the site makes money.
- [19:40]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. No question. So, like, you know, for maybe our listeners who are trying to get more information about Discover or figure out where to go with their. Their site's investment and efforts around Google Discover, are there ways that you or your agency can help better unpack this source of traffic from. From Google?
- [20:00]
Lily Ray
Yeah, because we've had so much insight into how sites perform on there just because of the nature of the sites that we work with for years. We put together a product years ago that are. It's just a Google Discover audit. So it's totally distinct from an SEO audit. It's really just focused on how to help companies get more traffic and Discover. We have a variety of different tools that we use above and beyond Search Console to understand what, what the competitive landscape looks like, what's the potential for sites to drive more traffic in their category. And we work closely with editorial teams to guide them on, number one, how to get more traffic and discover, number two, how to do this in a way that's coherent with their SEO strategies as well. And those are like, they end up being 100 pages of custom recommendations for companies. And I'm really excited about these because this is something where implementing those recommendations, you can see changes like a week or two later. So it's quite different than SEO. And we have a variety of different case studies where it's like they implemented what we recommended, and two weeks later they're seeing 200% increases in Discover, 300%. Whatever the numbers are, it works. So we're really excited about those.
- [21:09]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And where can our listeners go find out more about these audits?
- [21:13]
Lily Ray
Yeah, the AMSIF website. You could probably just type ams of Discover audits. We have a specific page for it. But yeah, on the AMS of website.
- [21:19]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. A huge thank you to Lily Ray from amsif for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Lily, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit our company website, amsif.com.
- [21:35]
Sponsor Announcer
Okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible if you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comawt that's ahrefs a hrefs.comawt just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.