What are web stories?
Web Stories are a new way for you to serve up easily accessible, visually engaging content to your website visitors. These operate just like stories on Instagram and Snapchat, or fleets on Twitter. The difference here is that this content is hosted on your website and SEO value can be derived from it.
Here’s an example on CorkboardConcepts.com:
While it is possible to create Web Stories on any website, WordPress offers the most seamless experience with a corresponding Google plugin. If you aren’t using WordPress, however, you can use third-party tools like https://makestories.io/ to work through the process. Additionally, if you want to put your development skills to the test and develop your own framework the Open JS Foundation offers a wide array of dev tools https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=stories.
We’ll get into how you use Google’s plugin later.
Why should you be using web stories?
Simply put: because it gets your brand in front of new eyeballs. When you post a web story, you have the opportunity to have that story featured in the Google Discover feed. What is the Google Discover Feed, you ask?
It’s a stream of content that android users access to find articles and stories that are relevant to their interests. Google uses all of that intricate knowledge it has about your vocation and interests to curate content that it thinks you might find interesting and then presents that content to Android users in a feed.
When you create a web story and post it to your website, Google crawls that just like any other piece of content. What happens next is what makes Web Stories special, it matches your content with a relevant audience and serves it to them in the discover feed.
Here’s a look at some of the results of our recent experiments with Web Stories:
Web Story 1:
Web Story 2:
Web Story 3:
Web Story 4:
Web stories 1-3 are ones that we posted here on CorkboardConcepts.com and Web Story 4 is one that was done for a dog care franchise client. These initial forays into web stories have yielded some interesting results for us and our clients with each post getting more impressions and clicks than the last so far.
How do I start using web stories?
The easiest way to begin posting web stories is through a CMS [https://corkboardconcepts.com/marketing-resources/marketing-glossary/common-acronyms/what-does-cms-stand-for/] like WordPress. Simply install the Google Web Stories plugin, and you will be able to access them within the WordPress dashboard.
Here’s a quick note on tracking this traffic through Google Analytics:
Since these are deployed as Google AMP, you have to sync your analytics code directly with the articles. If you have your domain claimed through webmasters, this will automatically track for organic traffic but won’t default in analytics. Simply place your UA tag here to begin tracking in analytics.
There you go! You’re ready to start creating content in a new and exciting way that can be distributed directly to people interested in that exact topic. What story will you tell?
