Google Web Story Is A Game-Changer for Poets and Other Short Content Creators Since It Favors “Snackable” Content

Google’s Stories Plug-in For WordPress Is In Beta And Promises To Give An SEO Advantage To Short Reads And Video Clips

I made my first Google web story today using their beta WordPress plug-in from Github.

Google warns that its story creator is still in beta.

Get Ready to Tell Stories on WordPress

We’re not quite ready for prime time yet, but if you like to live dangerously, we invite you to try our first public beta. — Google

Here’s my inaugural web story in all of it’s glory!

I am excited.

Google’s stories promises to give story creators an advantage when people are searching for content online.

Google calls their story content “snackable.” They want little creations people can watch and read on their phones.

The minimum number of pages is 4, per Google’s best practices tips.

You should probably not go over 30 pages, since the idea is to keep stories short and to the point.

If you want to integrate video, there is a limit of 15 seconds per clip.

Google Stories is a new feature that has just rolled out recently. Make yours now and get the first adopter advantage.

I have multi-user WordPress set ups and I wasn’t able to get it to work on subdirectories, but I could get stories to work on my main directory. I will keep an eye on new versions as the bugs are worked out of Google Stories and write if I can get it to work on my multi-site’s subdirectories. In the worst case scenario, it works from the top directory, or a stand-alone WordPress set up.

If you can’t tell, this is going to be great, especially for people who write just a a few words, or want to distill longer pieces down to their essence to share with a mobile audience looking for a content “snack.”

My example of an adaptation of “My Mantra Is Love” is recreated as a beautiful short story for phone viewing above.

Here is the original version first published on Medium:

The new Google stories version is light, fun, pretty and whimsical. It makes me excited to adapt old stories to give them new life and audiences who might not have had the time to read longer, more textual pieces.

I can see Google Stories working great for short video clips and poetry that are so popular on the web these days. I suggest the poets among us adapt their writings to be Google Stories as part of their efforts to share their work with the world.

Google is pushing content creators to use the AMP service and the search engine has indicated that search results displaying Google stories will show high on the first page of results.

Now, you can create great little “snacks” incorporating your best work for people to read when they are browsing Google with their mobile phones!