If you use any social media app, you’re aware of what stories are. Twitter recently released their version and called them fleets. They’re growing in popularity on social platforms and now you can have them on your WordPress site with Web Stories from Google.
What are Web Stories?
Web Stories immerse your readers in fast-loading full-screen experiences. Easily create visual narratives, with engaging animations and tappable interactions. They can be shared and embedded across the web without being confined to a closed ecosystem or platform.
AMP.Dev
Below is a story we created in just a few short minutes. You can go directly to the story but also embed in posts as seen below. The share link gives you the direct link as well.
How should you use web stories?
We’re still navigating this as well but stories seem to provide a fun and engaging way to create summaries of blog posts, re-use for social media content and more.
Stories are pretty much on every social media platform in some manner at this point so the benefit is the user experience on stories is already established and they’ll know how to interact with your web story that you create.
What are the benefits of web stories?
The AMP site has several benefits of web stories:
- Create beautiful and engaging content easily
- Creative flexibility for editorial freedom and branding
- Sharable and linkable content
- Track and measure through analytics
- Fast loading times
- Immersive storytelling
- Robust advertising support
You can read more about some successes here.
Are there any SEO benefits of web stories?
You might not have realized it but you might have already read some news articles using the technology. Have you noticed what appear to be a slideshow on a news article? These load very fast because it uses AMP HTML.
News articles are popping up in the top of Google that use this technology and sites are seeing great results for returning users because of how fast these stories load.
Right now Web Stories can appear on Google Discover on Android and iOS via the latest Google app in the form of a carousel near the top of the feed. While this may not be directly searched, Google is pretty good about putting content in there that users click on based on their browsing history.
The biggest potential I see here is create immerse content that is highly engaging that people will want to share which ultimately leads back to you getting links to your website and content.
So, yes I think there’s a very real impact that using web stories could have on SEO.
How do I create a web story?
The AMP site has a bunch of resources and tools available but if you have a WordPress site, make sure to download the Web Stories plugin. The interface to create stories is very clean and user friendly.
If you need some inspiration to get started, they even have example templates that you can start with and edit. You can change fonts, colors, backgrounds and more. They even provide some stock imagery and basic shapes to play with in the editor.
What do you think?
Give us your impression on web stories in the comments. Are they a fad? Here to stay?
We’re going in on the idea they’re here to stay and you’ll see some more stories from us within our blogs in the near future.