Your guide to Google Web Stories

Hello and welcome! In this guide, we will take a closer look at a not-so-new but newly relevant feature from Google called Google Web Stories. We’ll explain what Google Web Stories are, why it’s more relevant than ever to implement them, and how you can get started. Let’s dive right in!

What are Google Web Stories?

Google Web Stories is a format for briefly presenting interesting information using a combination of text, images, and video. A Web Story can appear in Google Search, Google Images, and Google Discover, as well as on external websites through embedding on a page. The concept is similar to Instagram Stories or Facebook Stories, to make it easier to understand.

In fact, Google Web Stories have been around since 2018 without playing a particularly prominent role, but much indicates that this is now starting to change!

Click the link in this sentence to see an example of a Web Story created by CNN.

What value do Google Web Stories have?

The reason why you should pay attention to and implement Google Web Stories is not hard to explain. We simply believe that their potential has increased in terms of driving valuable traffic—especially compared to the relatively small effort required to launch them on your site.

In this way, they are very similar to Featured Snippets, which are also not particularly time-consuming to optimize for compared to the traffic they can generate.

At the moment, we also see competition within this format as extremely low, which makes implementation even more worthwhile.

How do you implement Google Web Stories?

Implementing Google Web Stories is easy! Google has kindly released a WordPress plugin specifically for this purpose—another sign that they’re now prioritizing Web Stories more than before!

Currently, during its beta phase, the plugin cannot be found and installed directly in WordPress, but you can easily add it through the following steps:

• Go to https://wp.stories.google/ and download the plugin Zip file.
• Click “Plugins” in the WordPress navigation menu, then “Add New” in the top left corner, and then “Upload Plugin.”
• Select the plugin Zip file where you saved it.
• Click “Install Now.”
• When the installation is complete, activate the plugin at the bottom of the page.

After these steps, you’re ready to start using the plugin—which you’ll conveniently find in the WordPress navigation menu under “Stories.”

Important guidelines from Google

Google also has the following guidelines that you should be aware of and follow if you want your Web Stories to have the chance to appear in search results:

• A Web Story must be at least 5 pages long and can consist of up to 30 pages.
• The information on each page of a Web Story should be complete—no cliffhangers requiring users to click to the next page.
• You can only place one link per page. For example, if a Web Story has 5 pages, you may include a maximum of 5 links in total.
• You can only include one affiliate link per Web Story, regardless of how many pages it has.

Note! Remember that it’s just as important as always to use well-optimized titles. For Web Stories, these should be relatively short and reflect the story being presented, for example: “Sweden’s best tourist destinations 2020,” “5 ways to peel an onion without crying,” etc.

Here you can find more tips on how to succeed with your Web Stories: https://wp.stories.google/stories/tips-web-stories-editor/

(It is also possible to implement Google Web Stories without the plugin, if you have the right coding skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Schema markup. However, that’s not something we’ll go into this time.)

Good luck with implementing your Web Stories!