Web stories are visually engaging, full-screen content found on Google Search and Discover for mobile devices.
The content format is similar to the “stories” functionality popular on many social media sites eg. Instagram Stories. In a vertical format, web stories can be made up of panels with videos and graphics which you tap or swipe through to consume content.
Here’s what a web story looks like on mobile results:
How to Rank for a Web Story
Here are some points to consider for your best chance to rank your content for a web story:
- Prioritize video content when creating a web story, then supplement it with images and text.
- Keep the text short. Reduce text to approximately 280 characters in total, approximately 40 to 70 words per slide within the web story. Longer content can be made available as an attachment link embedded in the web story frame.
- Make sure text is not blocked by other content on the page.
- Avoid distracting or repetitive animations.
- Keep titles shorter than 90 characters.
- Make sure that each web story has a link rel="canonical" to itself.
- Follow the AMP story metadata guidelines. Web stories must be valid AMP pages.
- Make sure that the image linked to your <amp-story> poster-portrait-src attribute is at least 640x853px and use an aspect ratio of 3:4.
- Ensure that the logo image linked to your <amp-story> publisher-logo-src attribute is at least 96x96 px and aspect ratio of 1:1.
Read Google’s Best practices for creating Web Stories for more in-depth information about the points above and other practices to consider.
Also refer to our blog article, How to Make Google Web Stories for a comprehensive research study gathering more insights into web stories.
How Semrush Collects Data About Web Stories
We crawl Google’s SERPs to collect the URLs linked to web stories. This allows you to see if a keyword ranks for a SERP feature in our Organic Research toolkit.
- When we scan a keyword’s SERP, we identify whether or not a web story is present anywhere on the results page.
- If a web story is present on the results page, but the domain you entered doesn’t appear for a web story: its icon will appear gray in the SERP Features column.
- If the queried domain ranks for a web story: you’ll see a stand-alone blue icon listed in the Positions column. This will allow you to see estimated traffic coming from the web story. You’ll also see another row in the same table with the URL’s organic ranking and estimated traffic.
To learn more about this SERP feature and others, read our SERP Features Guide.