Google recently announced their new beta WordPress plugin that allows publishers to benefit using Google’s new Web Stories. Google Web Stories helps you rank on the top of search engine results, including Google Images, Discover, and the Google App.
Google Web Stories
Recently introduced, Google Web Stories is a new type of accelerated mobile page, which contains contents delivered in small bits. Each web story page will only contain 10 words at max and google recommends keeping the max size of your web stories between four to thirty pages.
Each of these web stories can be monetized using multiple options, such as Google Ad Manager, Google DV360, and affiliate links. Google web stories are primarily focused on mobile users who prefer to read content at a glance. At the moment, Google Web Stories is free and open-source.
Web Stories WordPress Plugin
Google’s Web stories WordPress plugin is specifically built for publishers to gain more traffic using the web story format in search results. Both the web stories and the WordPress plugin are in beta mode at the moment. At the moment the current plugin does not contain any animations and there is no way to attach pages. But the final version will contain all said features and is expected to be much smoother than the current beta version.
Snackable Content
Google expressed the point of web stories as ‘Snackable Content’. Each web story will be a visual storytelling format that’ll appear in search results. These web stories can appear in multiple ways in results, such as
- A single result that will be available in all languages and regions that supports google search.
- A grid view result, which is only available in English in the United States.
- In the form of a carousel, currently available only in the United States.
- In Google Images, available in every region that supports google search.
- Discover, available only in the United States at the moment.
If publishers would like to include web stories, google recommends that every video should be no more than 15 seconds long and each one of them should contain subtitles.
Each video should contain captions so users can understand the content much better as they watch the video. The videos should have a vertical layout instead of a horizontal layout. Each page should only contain 200 characters or 30 words at most and the don’t size should be 24.
Benefits of Web stories
- Engaging content
- Sharable content across the web
- Performance can be tracked using analytics
- Fast load times
- Can be monetized with Ads and links
- Presets available in multiple layout templates and UI controls.
Publishers can download the WordPress plugin using the web stories beta page. If you are a developer and want to contribute, head over to its GitHub repository.
The WordPress plugin offers a unique approach to create content for web stories. The plugin offers a drag-and-drop editor and comes with its own dashboard for editing custom web stories or adding templates from the library.
