SEO for Web Stories: the optimizations for organic search results

The spotlight is once again on Google Web Stories, the snack content that for some time now appear in various products of the Big G ecosystem and that are receiving great interest from readers for their characteristics. At the heart of the new video series Search Central Lighting Talks on Youtube, in fact, there are the SEO tips for Web Stories and to monitor their performance in Search.

From Google SEO tips for Web Stories

The episode is entrusted to Pascal Birchler, Google’s Developer Relations Engineer, who guides the discussion by taking an overview of the topic, starting to explain what web stories are, how to create them and how to place ads inside them, so that online marketer, bloggers or site owners can take full advantage of it.

The story format has become popular for some years on major social media and since 2019 have also landed on Google: at the time they were still called AMP Stories, but they were already a “modern and engaging tool for an immersive storytelling on a website, which allows you to maintain full control over the experience and monetization“.

What are Web Stories and why they are useful to editors

In essence, Web Stories are a web-based version of the popular story format developed by various social apps, which brings together videos, images, animations and text “to create fully immersive fullscreen experiences, typically consumed in portrait mode on the smartphone”.

The stories allow the user to explore the content at their own pace, tap through them or swipe from one piece to the next.

Unlike their social counterparts, Web Stories allow the publisher to create beautiful and engaging content” with full control over the experience and monetization”.

Every decision, “from how to monetize your story to how long it stays online, depends on you,” says Birchler: this freedom offers “great creative flexibility and the ability to easily link to your other content, making Stories a natural part of your website”.

How to create Web Stories

The Googler explains that web stories are part of the open web and “under the hood are essentially normal HTML pages“; this means that they can be hosted on your own server and easily shared or embedded in sites and applications, without any restrictions on the ecosystem.

There are some ways to create Web Stories, depending on your needs and skills.

• Being only web pages, you can build web stories “by hand”: this is particularly useful “when you want to create stories with highly customized features”, but – as with normal web pages, It is important to have the right tools at hand to create this content, because “not everyone is a developer”.
• For this reason, there are independent story editing tools that help accelerate the content creation process without having to write a single line of code. Tools such as Makestories, Visual Stories or Newsroom AI (to name a few of those that already exist today) allow you to achieve better results thanks to visual editing and guidance along the way.
• Third mode, valid if your site is built using a CMS, you use a dedicated tool, such as the Web Stories plugin for WordPress, that allows to integrate the stories seamlessly into the existing editorial workflow and to make them an integral part of the site. These editors make it “easy and fun to produce visually amazing stories and guide you towards a beautiful end result, taking care of all the heavy work, so that you can focus on the actual creation of the story itself”. In particular, the Google tool uses “an intuitive WYSIWYG interface and useful building blocks to start quickly”.

How to optimize and maximize Web Stories results

But even the best story “is worth nothing if it doesn’t make you more successful”, Birchler clarifies, and it is therefore important to understand how to “get the most out of Web Stories using the various techniques and platforms available”.

After all, the ultimate goal of this product – editor side – is to make sure “that stories benefit your overall strategy and produce a ROI, return on investment”and so – after the creative advice provided some time ago – i