How To Do Web Stories SEO And Drive More Traffic To Website?

Google Web Stories SEO is key to get more engagement, clicks, and views on your web stories.

I have created this blog “How To Do Web Stories SEO And Drive More Traffic to Website?” to bring together the best practices to follow while creating Google Web Stories.

I am going to explain in detail the Web Stories SEO tactics to get the most out of your content.

So let’s get into the details.

Best Web Stories SEO practices for creating Google Web Stories

The story is the most popular way to tell the world about your brand or business. The more engaging it is the more you are going to get the benefit out of it. We recommend you follow the Web Stories SEO tips to keep your readers engaged.

1.   Storytelling

People love to watch stories and hence every platform is giving so much importance to this feature. Your story must display an interesting story. Even if you are not good enough at storytelling, you can use the below points to make it interesting and engaging.

• Use videos

Nowadays videos are more popular than text and images to tell your story. So use more videos to create your story. Although you can supplement it with images and a little bit of text.

• Make it relatable

People love the stories that are real. You must bring your perspective and make it realistic. You can share your opinions and views beyond the facts.

• Create suspense

Try to keep a narrative style. To keep the engagement continued till the last slide you must keep suspense in your story from one page to another. It must be valuable content at the end and the user must have enjoyed watching it.

2.   Design

A good design will always catch the attention of the viewers. You can follow the below-mentioned tips to create a web story with a nice design.

• Avoid lengthy text

Avoid using more text on pages. It should be approximately 280 characters per page.

• No overlapping of text

Ensure that text is not blocked by other content on the page. Overlapping of text with images makes the story experience bad. Also avoid using burned in text, as it prevents text to get resized as per different devices.

• Use animations cautiously

Animations are surely going to make your story interesting and lively. But avoid repetitive and not related animations which can be dis-attractive and boring.

• Relevant Call-to-actions

Make sure you are using the relevant call to action specific to a certain platform and web story. It is possible that you have created a story for Facebook or Instagram originally and recreating it as Google Web Story. So be careful to put the specific call to action.

• Full bleed videos and images to be used

Always use full bleed videos and images in your web stories to create a more immersive user experience for readers.

• Use High-Quality Images

Avoid using low-resolution or hazy videos and images. Also, make sure that it does not get distorted while resizing.

• Short videos

It is recommended to use videos of less than 15 seconds per page or 60 seconds maximum.

• Logo on your cover page

Add a high-resolution logo to your cover page that represents your brand.

• Include Audio

You can use audio or music to the story or can use audio clips that are at least 5 seconds long with clear and audible audio.

• Auto-advance for video-only web stories

For a better user experience consider using auto advanced experience for video-based web stories.

3.  SEO for Web Stories

Web Story also has a link or URL, so the same SEO practices will apply as in the case of a web page or blog post. Mentioning some important web story SEO practices below:

• Display valuable content

It is said that content is the king, so it is the same in the case of web stories too. Create and provide high-quality content for the users that are interesting and valuable.

• The title should be catchy

Keep the title short and catchy at the same time. It is always better to keep the title less than 70 characters.

• Attach Metadata

You must follow the AMP story metadata guidelines for your web stories. You must include markup that you do for your web page such as: title and description meta tags, structured data, OGP, twitter card

• Ensure that Google can find your web story

Your web stories should not have any attribute that blocks Google to index your page and stop it to appear in Google search. Add your Web Stories to your sitemap. To ensure you can check to know if Google can find your Web stories with the Index coverage report and site maps report in the search console.

• Web stories should be self-canonical

All web stories should be canonical.  Always ensure that each Web Story has a link rel=”canonical” to itself. For example: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.xyz.com/url/to/webstory.html”>

Note: If the story has multiple versions in different languages, make sure to tell Google about localized versions.

• Include structured data

When you include structured data in your Web Story, it will help Google search understand the structure and content of your Web story.

• Add alt text on images

Always add alt text on images to improve your story’s discover-ability on search engines.

• Integrate Web stories into your site

It is always a good idea to integrate Web Stories into your website. This can be done by linking web stories from your home page or category page (as applicable). You can create an extra page as www.xyz.com.stories, and link them to your key pages for better performance.

• AMP story page attachments

You can use  AMP story page attachments to present additional information with your Web Story. This will help to provide extra detail, deep dives, or onward journeys for the content presented in your Web Story.

• Include subtitles on video

It is a good idea to add captions to your video to help readers better understand your web story. But to do this make sure your captions don’t overlap with other content or flow off the screen and are not burned into the video.

• Optimize video-only web stories

You should use semantic HTML to build your web story. Although there are some web story editor tools that export a story that formats each slide as a video file that bakes in all the text into the video. Due to this reason we recommend that you add the clear text displayed inside the video as a title attribute on the amp-video element. We recommend doing this if you can’t use semantic mark-up in your web stories.

• Include support for landscape displays

It is recommended to add support for landscape displays to enable web stories to show up in desktop Google search results.

• Web Story must be valid

Google web stories must be valid AMP pages. It is better to test your Story using the AMP Validator tool and fix any detected errors. This way you can avoid invalid AMP issues.

• Poster image should be free of text

Poster image must be free of text or any burned text. When users preview your story in search results, the text could obstruct the title of your story. It is a general tendency that if a user is not able to read the title they will not be interested in continuing watching the web story.

• The poster Image should be in right size and aspect ratio

The recommended size of the image linked to your <amp-story> poster-portrait-src attribute is at least 640x853px and use an aspect ratio of 3:4.

• Use logo with the right aspect ratio

The logo image linked to your <amp-story> publisher-logo-src attribute should be at least 96×96 px and an aspect ratio of 1:1.

• Include og:image

To improve your web story’s discover-ability in Google search, you should include of: image in your <meta> tags

Final Words on Web Stories SEO

I have included all the important Web stories SEO components in this guide. If you are a blogger, digital marketer, or publisher and expecting new traffic, more sales, and profit then web stories may be the best thing to start. Start creating interesting web stories with the technology to see where it could take you in 2022.

In case you are not able to create web stories for yourself, we offer professional Google Web Stories creation services to get you started.