Everything You Need To Know About Web Story
Contents
What is a web story
A Web Story is a visual storytelling format which is immersive, tappable & easily shareable, and is previously known as AMP Stories. These stories can be created easily with engaging animations. These are built using the AMP framework and supported by Google. Web Story is open source, free for all and is available for everyone to use on their websites. With Web Stories, webmasters can now easily share news & information with their target audience in a tappable and mobile focused format with engaging experience.
The main intent behind web stories is to share your news & information as visually appealing stories but by saying less. To convey a whole story with few sentences is undeniably a difficult task. And here comes creativity. So, be creative while preparing content and graphics for your story.
Along with mobile first experience, web stories also offer advertising opportunities to webmasters. With this opportunity, webmasters can reach unique audiences on the web.
So, going forward web story can be a real challenge to Facebook story or Instagram story. Also, unlike Facebook or Instagram story, web stories can be embedded on websites and found on Google search.
Benefits of web story for businesses
So, let’s see What Web Stories offer you, why it is the talk of the town, how it can help you in your brand development, customer outreach & more businesses.
Let’s have a look at the benefits:
- Offer content creators & publishers a unique way to showcase their creativity in mobile platforms.
- Potential to attract more traffic.
- Appear in Google search, Google Images, Discover, and the Google app.
- One of the best way to produce beautiful engaging content.
- You can add Images, videos, GIFs, texts, audio, animations and interactions to Web Stories.
- Feel free to add interactive elements.
- Support analytics for tracking & measurement.
- Web Stories are lightning fast & hence provide a better UX in mobile platforms.
- A part of the open web, so free for all.
- Can be shared and embedded across sites and apps.
- Offer monetization capability. Publishers can use ads & affiliate links.
Web story creation guideline by Google
- Always try to create a web story that conveys the complete story and not primarily intended for commercial purpose. These are few examples from Google on what to avoid:
- Don’t create web stories that require users to click on the link of other apps or websites to get complete information.
- Don’t put more than one outlink or attachment per page. Give full disclosures of all your outlinks and attachments.
- Try to create an impactful cover page by adding catchy titles and high quality images.
- Create your web stories using videos and images that should fit and fill the user screen size.
- The recommended length of web story is between 5-30 pages and the suggested target length is 10-20 pages.
- Your web story title should be short and its length must be less than 40 characters.
- Use short text per page with ideal character limit of 200.
- Each page should be built around a single idea.
- Recommended video length for each page is less than 15 seconds with proper caption. Never use videos of more than 60 seconds.
- Don’t overuse animations or embeds in your web story and focus on transition timing.
- It is recommended to use only one affiliate link per story by following the Google quality guidelines for affiliate programs.
How to create web story using WordPress Plug-in
Google is now providing a WordPress plugin named “Web Stories” for webmasters. Webmasters can Download & Install this plugin and start creating web stories for their target audience.
How to install the plugin?
- Login to your WordPress admin panel & click on “Add New” present under Plugins.
- After that, search for “Web Stories”.
- Then you will see “Web Stories” plugin by Google. Hit on “Install Now”.
- After installation, click on “Activate” button to activate the plugin.
- After activation, you will see “Stories” menu in the left sidebar of your WordPress Admin Dashboard.
Create your web story
After successful installation of the plugin, now it’s time to create your own web story.
We can create new web stories from scratch or by using templates.
To use the existing templates, go to
Stories > Dashboard > Explore Templates
To build a web story from scratch, go to
Stories > Add New
Creating a web story using this plugin is really easy. Its story editor is easy to use. Text, images, videos, and shapes can be easily added to a web story. You can upload new images and videos directly from the story interface. Existing media items can also be added.
While creating a web story, you can check out two tabs “Design” & “Document” present in the right sidebar section.
As the name suggests, Design Tab is for design purposes. Just click on any element in the story editor and change its design in the Design Tab.
And in the Document Tab, you will get options like Status & Visibility, Publish Date & Time, Author, Publisher Logo, Cover Image, Permalink, and Page Advancements. Webmasters must look into this tab before publishing their web story.
After you are done with your story editing, you can publish your story by clicking on the Publish button. The story can also be previewed by clicking on the Preview button. These 2 buttons are present on the top right corner of the story editor.
Additional Tools to create web story
WordPress plug-in is not the only option to create web story. You can create web stories without a single line of coding by using other tools also. Here are the options for you.
How to test the validity
Only creating web stories is not enough. After publishing it, we need to check whether the story is valid or lacking something. To check this, Google has recently launched a tool to recognize whether the AMP document of a website is a web story or not. Also Google hinted that in their testing tools and performance reports, Google will use the term “Web Story” to identify this format.
Is it going to change the future of marketing
You may think that why to make so much effort when there are other ways, different platforms for storytelling.
Ok, valid one but think about the popularity of Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook stories. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram stories are undeniably gaining popularity day by day.
With this trend, and seeing the rich features, we believe that going forward, these web stories definitely have the potential to stand out in Search Engine Result Pages.
When a web story is featured in Mobile SERP, we can see an image thumbnail along with a webstory icon. These things can help the web story to gather attention and improve click through rate from Mobile SERP.
We know how aggressively Google has been pushing its own features/products in search results. It’s not like they are selfish but we know how user-friendly those are.
The way Google is recommending web stories so hard now, it’s very likely web stories will get special preference in search results in near future. So, let’s be ready for the change by creating beautiful and useful web stories of our own.
How to find your web story in Google search
Google has already mentioned that web stories will be available in Google search results in addition to image search, Google Discover and Google app. But, are you getting any web stories on Google search results?
No!
This was the exact case with me a few days ago. I tried to search for web stories in Google SERP but was unable to get those. Then I found that web stories could be viewed in Google search results with a simple URL extension /static/gs.
I have shared that idea in a blog post on how to get web stories in Google SERP on any entity if such a web story is present in the web.
- SEO Best Practices Post-Google Search Update March 2024 - October 9, 2024
- Do SEOs Need To Know HTML? - December 20, 2021
- How To Find Attribution-Free Music For Your Videos? - September 20, 2021
