Web Stories are a new way to tell stories on the internet. These “Stories” blend video, audio, images, animation, and text together to create an immersive experience for viewers. The reader can explore them at your own pace by tapping through or swiping from one piece of content to another!
You’ll find Web Stories in Google Search across many pages including Google Discovery and other Google apps as well as individual webpages in the Serps. They’re also available on Google Images.
Carousel Stories on Google Discover are available in the United States, India and Brazil. They can be found near the top of your feed as a series of icons for different categories including lifestyle content, fitness or celebrity gossip to name just a few!
Google Web Stories are immersive, full-screen experiences that you can host on your own website with AMP technology!
Unlike blog posts that have one long piece of content. Web stories are broken up into smaller visual slides/images that tell your blog post or story in a very narrative manner. It’s like several Pinterest pins all rolled up together.
Tools for Creating Google Web Stories
Google offers a number of third-party suggestions for developing Google Web Stories. Their own plugin is what I use but there are also many other third-party plugins that can help you create stories or even better.. Templates to make the whole process easier.
Tools like NewsroomAi and Makestories.io are two of my favorite tools for web stories.
Benefits of Using Google Web Stories
Finding an alternative source of organic traffic can’t be bad right? Plus it’s a Google feature so they will want to promote and drive this feature. It could be the key to Google crawling your site faster as well? Possibly, if one of your stories goes viral or lands on the first page of Google Discovery.
So, Let’s take a look at some of my web stories, and let me show you all the basic functions you’ll need to know in order to make the stories and publish them correctly.
Finally, I will show you how to test that your story is indexed in the Serps.
Remember this is a mini-series all about Google Web Stories. My three video series should help you understand why I’m testing them out.