Welcome to another insightful week with The SEOs Diners Club newsletter. Leveraging over a decade of SEO expertise, I aim to distill the week's most critical developments into a concise read that won't take more than ten minutes of your time. Let's dive into the insights that matter.

This week, we will delve into the topic of Google Discover and offer some insightful suggestions on enhancing your online presence on this platform.

1️⃣ How To Stand Out On Google Discover?

Google Discover offers users ever-changing and personalized content. However, there are some critical points to know when doing SEO work for Google Discover.

Discover opens new doors for the future of SEO. To use this platform effectively, it is not enough to produce quality content and optimize it correctly.

If you want to increase your discover traffic, you should learn these:

1. Google Discover Provides Unpredictable Traffic

Google Discover's traffic flow is volatile and unpredictable. That's why it shouldn't be central to your core strategy; It should be considered an extra traffic source.

2. Provides User Behavior Insights

Google Discover provides valuable insights into user behavior. This helps you understand what content your audience likes to click on.

3. Internal Links Are Very Important

Internal linking can significantly increase a story's Google Discover performance, especially for niche topics.

4. The Role of AMP is Unclear

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), recommended initially for Google Discover, have become controversial. Some of the news sites continue to use AMP. But many are making plans to get rid of AMP.

5. Provide Topical Authority

Establishing topical authority is critical. This long-term game requires consistently producing high-quality and authoritative content on specific topics.

6. Pay Attention to EEAT Best Practices

Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) is essential. False expertise or authorship can negatively impact your performance. Creating an imprint for an unreal person may create a negative situation.

7. Create Compelling Titles

Headlines play an essential role in attracting clicks on the Discover feed. However, there should be no clickbait. This rule does not apply in Turkey; Google does not pay the necessary attention to clickbait and turns a blind eye to people being made fools.

8. Pay attention to writers

Using a specific author's name rather than a generic phrase can improve performance in Discover and help establish authority.

9. Use Tools to Discover Analysis

Google Search Console, GD Dash, and Chartbeat are valuable tools for analyzing Discover traffic and identifying opportunities.

You can monitor the performance of your content using the Performance Report for Discover.

10. Pay Attention to Visual Content

Original images and short videos can perform well in Explore. The important thing is to focus on unique, high-quality visual content. It is recommended that large images be at least 1,200 pixels wide.

In conclusion, SEO optimization for Google Discover involves a comprehensive understanding of the unpredictability of traffic and the importance of EEAT and topic authority.

You can learn more about the subject by watching the YouTube interview of SEO expert Aleyda Solis and her friends.

2️⃣ Google Completes September 2023 Helpful Content Update

This update constitutes one of the many signals that Google's complex algorithm and artificial intelligence systems can use when determining search results. If you experienced a loss of traffic during this update, there is a good chance that your site is classified as “not useful.”

Google states that this classification may be removed. So, removing or fixing “unhelpful” content could be key.

For more information, Google recommends consulting the “Creating Helpful, Trustworthy, Human-Centered Content” document.

3️⃣ Google Launches “SEO Made Easy” YouTube Series

Google has released a new YouTube series called “SEO Made Easy”. The first part of the series focuses on Google's use of structured data to customize site names in search results. The series is aimed at both beginner and experienced website owners.

The importance of this series is that it aims to explain the complexity of SEO to users of all levels. Structured data is especially critical in terms of brand awareness and click-through rates.

Again, Google's focus on this issue reveals how important structured data is for SEO. If you haven't taken any steps in this regard yet, this new series from Google may be just for you. You can learn the basics and understand how to improve your current strategy.

4️⃣ Google-Extended: New Google Browser to Block Bard or Google AI

Google has announced a new web browser called Googlebot, aka Google-Extended. It lets you control whether it can use your content to improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs or future Google AI products.

It has been revealed that conversations made with Google Bard in the past weeks have started to be indexed on Google. Funny, but Google couldn't guess this :)

If you do not want Bard to use your content, you need to specify the Google-Extended user agent in your Robots.txt file. Google will not crawl with Google Extended but will continue to use its regular Googlebot or other bots. Google-Extended will notify Google that it should not use this content for Bard or other AI projects.

5️⃣ How Can You Avoid the Google Rich Results Shakeup?

Google significantly changed its How-To and FAQ-rich results on August 8. Now, FAQs are specific to certain businesses, and How-Tos are desktop-only.

This means the positive impact will be lost for How-To rich results, and most sites are not authoritative enough for FAQs. So, how can we get out of this situation?

First, you must identify the keywords and associated pages you are losing or dropping. This would be a simple ranking or traffic comparison exercise.

Next, we will evaluate the intent behind the dropped keywords. For example, words such as “how” and “why” represent informational queries, while words such as “for sale” or “price” represent transactional queries.

We see that these changes affect websites that use structured data and sites that create easily identifiable HTML content and do not use structured data.

So, Google's change affects sites with structured data and those that do not use such data.

Ultimately, the way to survive this type of Google update is to identify your losses, understand user intent, and adapt to changes in SERP features. For example, providing more images, adding structured data to images, or adding alternative text.

6️⃣ Is Alt Text a Ranking Factor for Google Image Search?

Alt Text is a critical ranking factor for Google Image Search, but it does not directly impact general web search. They are essential for accessibility but not a magic bullet for SEO.

The importance of alt text for SEO is frequently discussed, especially in Google Image Search.

However, it should be noted that these texts do not directly affect organic search rankings. Google emphasizes that alt text plays a critical role in recognizing images, but it does not say that these texts will increase the overall ranking of your website.

On the contrary, Google states wrong practices, such as keyword stuffing, can harm your site. So, alt texts only impact Google Image search as a ranking factor. It does not affect general search, but the importance of these texts should not be underestimated. Alt texts are especially useful in terms of accessibility. When writing alt text, ask yourself what you want someone who can't see the image to understand about the image.

In short, prepare your Alt Texts carefully, But remember that these are not a magic bullet for SEO.

7️⃣ Book Of The Week: “The Leadership Skills Handbook: 90 Essential Skills You Need to be a Leader” - Jo Owen

Jo Owen's "Leadership Skills Handbook" is an important guide. The book highlights the basic skills that an effective leader must have.

Owen goes beyond theoretical knowledge and offers practical information on how leaders are successful in real life. It shows what works in many areas, from human relations to organizational skills, personal values, and behavior.

These skills are critical for every leader to overcome the challenges they face. And Owen guides readers on applying these skills to their lives.

This book is a valuable resource that every leader should have to keep up with the innovations brought by the century and reach the top of leadership. Owen's 90 essential skills and new leadership approaches will take you one step forward in your leadership journey.

I hope you enjoyed this week's SEO insights. I am looking forward to seeing you next Sunday. Have a great week!

Best,

Mert Erkal

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