SEO Podcasts

Audio SEO Best Practices: How to Optimize for Audio Search  Voices.com
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Podcast metadata spans the spectrum from the minimal and functional to the obscure and mysterious to the highly-optimised and keyword-stuffed. For some, a title can be another form of creative expression, whereas for many – especially those podcasting for business, or with plans to monetise – it can feel like essential groundwork in garnering new listeners from search.
For years, the prevailing wisdom has been that your podcast name and episode titles are the biggest factor, but presumably a good, detailed but not over-long description can help capture some of those search terms that are relevant but would be too spammy to put in the title?
Well, sort of. The truth is that’s pretty much never been the case for Apple Podcasts, which only cares about your titles and your author tags. But what about the increasing number of equally-important or otherwise complementary podcast directories? Where do we need to focus our efforts if we want episodes to surface for relevant search terms, and how can we avoid filling our titles with word salad?
I teamed up with James, the editor of Podnews, to perform some experiments on a couple of our feeds we knew wouldn’t cause waves of confusion were we to stuff them full of nonsense words in the name of science. So James updated the metadata for his Podclock podcast, and I did the same with a now-moribund feed.
The idea was to pick a different nonsense word for each relevant podcast-related tag in our RSS feeds, and to see which apps picked up which words.
For our experiment, we limited the list of apps to
This list represents the most popular podcast apps, and all podcast apps with more than 1% market share according to typical podcast host reports.
These are the tags in a podcast’s RSS feed that relate to the podcast as a whole, not individual episodes. If your podcast covers one particular topic in-depth or you’re looking to build a community around a specific area of interest, your podcast-level metadata may be a key contributor to your success in search. So, let’s look at what podcast-level metadata is being indexed.
Unsurprisingly, a search on your podcast name will return your podcast in all apps. If it doesn’t, that probably means your title is too common. The word ‘Podcast’ in your title probably doesn’t help your SEO either, since Podcast Index data suggests that more than 600,000 shows have that word in the title.
Castbox, Google Podcasts, Listen Notes, Player FM, PodcastAddict, Spotify, and Stitcher all add your podcast description to their indexes, so info you add here will surface in search. Overcast’s web search will also surface info from your description, but crucially this does not apply to the app.
That means Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and Pocket Casts do not index your podcast’s description.
The new Podcasting 2.0 tag for storing info about who contributes to a podcast is not being used in any search engine we surveyed. This includes the Podcast Index itself.
I’m a little sad about this – even if not surprised to see it snubbed by established apps – as guest and host names feel like something people would want to search on. However, past conversations with the tech team at Podchaser have led me to understand these tags are ripe for spammers, who’ll put any old famous name in there in the hopes it’ll result in more downloads.
This isn’t to suggest the tag has no value. Far from it. Just because the names aren’t being surfaced in search results doesn’t mean it’s not a great way to link podcasts together, but I’d love to see it influence results for guest-based podcasts. Still, early days.
iVoox, Player FM and Stitcher were the only apps not to index this tag.
Again, the only time this came up was in Overcast’s web search, but not in the app. That essentially means this tag is not being indexed in any meaningful way. Unsurprisingly so, since this tag has been removed from the Apple Podcasts RSS guide.
The only meaningful place this turned up was the Podcast Index website. Other than that, consider this tag for informational purposes only.
This tag is no longer in the Apple Podcasts RSS guide, which is understandable given that it has as much use as your website’s <meta> keyword tags. That said, CastBox and Player FM still index this tag, so if you just wanted to cater to users of those apps and those apps alone, knock yourself out.

These are the tags that relate to each episode in your podcast. If you cover uniquely different topics or have interesting guests each episode, chances are this is the ground you’ll be fighting for in search, as if you can meet a prospective listener’s need with a specific and relevant episode, you might just have hooked a new subscriber. So let’s look at what episode-level metadata apps and directories are indexed.
The Podcast Index, Pocket Casts and Overcast are the only apps not to surface episode-level titles in search. What that shows me is that these apps are much more focused on discovery of podcast series – not individual episodes – by keyword.
Also, you need to tell CastBox that you want to search by episode, as its search engine isn’t smart enough to search both podcast-level and episode-level metadata at the same time.
The plain-text podcast description is only being indexed by Google Podcasts and GoodPods. I have been thinking it’s best ignoring this tag as apps can’t decide on whether to allow HTML or not, though recently support appears to be a little more consistent.
This is where your show notes live. However, Google Podcasts, iVoox, Stitcher, and Listen Notes are the only apps that index rich-text episode descriptions.
It may be that if <content:encoded> is present, aggregators ingest this information instead of the <description>, and this is what we’re uncovering here. This certainly happens when some apps display episode descriptions. This might need a little more investigation.
This deprecated tag is a wasteland. It’s not the only tag to garner no search results across the apps we surveyed, but it’s one of the few that surprises me a little, so I thought it worth mentioning.
Apple Podcasts, CastBox, and PodcastAddict are the only apps to index the episode-level author tag.
Unless you’re going to operate like the minority of podcasts that keyword-stuff their titles – which is a bit tacky and against Apple’s guidelines – I think it’s unwise to put too many eggs in the podcast-app search basket. Search is just not evolved enough within these apps to be meaningful.
CastBox and Google Podcasts are the hungriest apps, indexing the most amount of tags. Pocket Casts was surprising in that it appeared to index only the most basic of podcast-level metadata.
To me these findings highlight the need for good podcast websites. Compelling titles, rich and meaningful show notes, useful links, host and guest bios; all of these are useful for placement within Google and other web search engines because they’re useful to humans. But there are some gaps in podcast search that need to be filled, even if at the expense of letting in a little spam.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think keyword spam is a consideration being made by these apps. I think it’s simply that not enough time or effort has been put into good search database design. Many apps are powered by quite rudimentary relational databases that perform well for linking one table to another, but perform less well for full-text search.
For apps like Overcast, Pocket Casts, and Spotify, search seems to exist mainly to allow a podcast to be found by name, rather than by topic.
If you’re already working to best practises, nothing in these findings should change your behaviour. Maybe it’ll remove a couple of things from the pipeline, since it really doesn’t matter if you have a relevant set of keywords in your feed, for example.
As a podcast producer, this helps cement certain key points:
I have a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. It’s called Beware of the Leopard, which is a well-known reference to a line in the first episode of the radio show (it’s also in the book, the TV show, and the film). But you wont find my podcast by searching for “hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” (in most apps at least). You might find it if you search one of the place or character names (like “arthur dent”), but only if we mentioned one of them in the episode title.
This is obviously a failing on my part, since “Beware of the Leopard – the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast” isn’t an unreasonably-long or thirsty name, but it feels a bit clumsy, and since my podcast website is powered by my podcast host, I’d be taking up a lot of screen real-estate by more-than-doubling my podcast title length (this isn’t a problem if you run your own website).
As John Dinkel spotted in January 2020, Parcast has an SEO strategy when it comes to titling their podcasts that might be worth considering.
The best podcast players do one thing really well: play podcasts. I think we as podcasters assume that the burden of responsibility for “discoverability 🤮” is on their shoulders, but that’s not what podcast apps are for… they’re for playing podcasts.
GoodPods is an app for discoverability more than it is a player, so I’d love to see them do more in search.
App developers have an opportunity to improve the space, by implementing more than the rudimentary full-text search their database allows. MongoDB is a flexible database which is great for storing episodes alongside series, and its full-text index is pretty good. Then of course there are search-first database engines like Elasticsearch and Solr, and super-simple ones like Whoosh and Xapian. A judicious mix of indexing and weighting – where the developer decides which fields are more likely to be of importance to the user – and perhaps a bit of sugar added to the final score for each result – like the number of people in your app subscribed to the feed, how frequently it puts out episodes, how recently it has been updated, or how long it’s been around for – can all contribute to a healthy in-app search.
In time, this may get easier with transcripts. We haven’t tested full transcripts, but that might be an experiment worth running at some point. Here I’m not necessarily thinking about adding data into your transcript that a search engine will like, but instead thinking longer-term about how podcast marketplaces will use their own in-house transcripts to boost search, which is something Castbox, and sometimes Apple Podcasts, already does. Spotify has also said that they’ll be using transcripts to boost their search in future.
I was in the web development game long before I got paid to make podcasts, and SEO was a topic that came up a lot, as you might imagine. The fundamental truths haven’t changed in the last 15 years or so: search engines are there to help people find things, not to help customers find businesses (or in our case, podcasts to find listeners). Our job is to make the best possible podcast we can, and to use metadata to describe it in a way that is helpful to humans. Like fashion, the rules of good and bad SEO change with the seasons, and trying to keep on top of them at all times is tiring and ultimately only ever leads to short-term wins.
A great way to get new listeners to a single episode is to stuff your podcast name and episode title with keywords. But it’s not how you keep them, and it’s not how you build trust with them.
The object is not to find new listeners through these apps (unless you’re paying for ads within them). Instead, make your podcast easy to find by name, so that when people read your insightful tweet, your on-point newsletter submission, your helpful blog post or your conference talk slide, they know exactly what to search for, whichever app they use.
James Cridland adds: As an afterthought, it’s worthwhile looking at the market share of the apps that were tested. I took that data from Buzzsprout’s global stats figures from June, and overlaid them on the results to help us know where to put our energy as podcasters.
Only 4.3% of podcast listeners use an app that searches episode descriptions (or, more accurately, only 4.3% of downloads from podcast apps come from those that support searching through episode descriptions). Another reason, perhaps, to focus a little more on episode titles?

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Get your ecommerce site ready for the holiday season. Learn how to attract shoppers and drive revenue during peak shopping periods.
Peak shopping periods like Black Friday, Halloween, Christmas, and other holidays attract millions of shoppers online.
They also present prime opportunities for ecommerce and retail brands to drive incremental revenue and traffic for the holiday season.
According to the NRF, the 2024 holiday forecast is consistent with its forecast that annual sales for 2024 will be between 2.5% and 3.5% over 2023. Some noteworthy mentions:
One differentiating characteristic from last year’s holiday shopping season is that the shopping period between Thanksgiving and Christmas will be six days shorter, totaling 26 days. Additional contributing factors this year could include the economic impact of Hurricanes Helene and Milton; even though the 2024 U.S. presidential election will take place during the winter holiday season, it is impossible to measure its impact on current or future spending.
According to Statista, in the U.S., a lot of holiday consumers intend to buy products for 2024 for the holiday celebration, with 97% for Halloween, 92% for Thanksgiving, and 96% for Christmas.
Since sales are expected to be up year over year, what are the best ways to optimize your site for the holidays? When should you start, and what should you do? Let’s explore.
One of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for the holidays is planning.
If you build landing pages now for Christmas and expect them to rank for competitive terms, it won’t happen.
Always build out your content calendar in advance (i.e., two to three months or more ahead of time).
Make sure you do your keyword research and start planning which content you need to create, get approvals for, deploy, etc.
Create reusable URLs for promotions that you can use year after year. You can mention the date or year in the page title or copy and then change it each year, but don’t use it in the URL.
I can’t tell you that, in my 20 years of doing SEO, I saw a lot of big brands make the mistake of either taking down their landing pages or adding the year to their landing page URL for seasonal products.
The good news is that most big box retailers are doing this correctly now.
For example, Target has a dedicated landing page for its Thanksgiving TV deal at https://www.target.com/s/samsung+tv+deals+thanksgiving.
Now, if it were to put in a year, it would have to redirect the page every year, but it is following a good SEO strategy. This allows the pages to age, secure links, build authority, and be used for internal links.
We live in a world where AI has changed user behavior, and people ask questions about your brand and our product.

Unfortunately, SEO keeps getting pushed down further and further down the page.
You must work with your paid search team to build a blended strategy for ranking competitive keywords and owning the entire SERP.
For example, a search for [what is the best TV to buy for thanksgiving] has transactional intent. The SERPs show sponsored listings first, followed by videos and People Also Ask (PAA).
Having both a paid ad and ranking organically is key to capturing more clicks and potential sales.
Paid search can also create holiday-themed ad campaigns targeting your trophy keywords and drive more sales.
Build out content that uses the PAA strategy. This feature in the Google SERPs provides end users with additional questions related to their search query and quick answers.
Reddit has been showing up in the SERPS for questions regarding holiday queries.
This represents an opportunity to get in front of your target audience, so make sure to follow Reddit’s best practices, which include:
Make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices, loads as quickly as possible – preferably under 3 seconds – and passes Core Web Vitals.
It’s important from a user experience perspective, especially because most shopping will be done using a mobile device. Avoid big holiday hero images, interstitials, etc.
Display promotions on your homepage to drive incremental clicks and sales.
If you had holiday pages from last year, you might want to refresh the content so that you can update it in time for the holiday season with new and popular products, seasonal messaging, and images.
Product descriptions are especially important and can improve your ecommerce site’s visibility during the holiday shopping season.
Using relevant holiday keywords can help your products appear in holiday-related research and make them more appealing to shoppers looking for relevant products.
After you conduct your keyword research for your holiday terms using your favorite tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc., produce a list of terms including:
Highlight holiday use cases. Describe how the product can be used during the holidays or why it makes a great gift, and add videos.
Use seasonal modifiers; add holiday-specific adjectives to your product titles and descriptions. Example for clothing:
While email marketing doesn’t directly impact SEO, it can indirectly help your SEO efforts during the holiday season.
Having targeted email campaigns can bring previous customers back to your store, as long as they’re personalized based on previous purchases, browsing interest, and limited offers.
With the recent events in the world, i.e., U.S. port strikes by 45,000 dock workers, wars, hurricanes, an uncertain presidential election, and the fact that COVID is still around, there are still some issues with the supply chain.
You always need to have a plan if your products aren’t available if something happens.
In this case, it is recommended to stock up on products that have sold out in previous years and make sure your inventory management system is integrated with your website in real time.
Other alternatives include:
Social platforms are critical to engaging customers and driving sales.
Creating useful and shareable content, holiday giveaways, and social media deals can drive engagement metrics and promote your holiday SEO content to attract links and social endorsements. In addition, shoppable posts facilitate discovery and purchases on social platforms.
Adding in a site search, if you don’t have one, can significantly improve user experience, increase conversions, and indirectly benefit your SEO efforts.
Users like to search using on-site functionality.
With the number of cyber security threats, data breaches, and incremental web traffic during the holidays, always run a technical audit on the site and make sure:
Use structured data (i.e., Product schema) so Google can understand your products and show product discounts and sales prices, which could have a positive impact on rankings and clicks.
While not exactly pertaining to SEO, having a checkout process that is hard for users to navigate can have a detrimental impact on your online sales.
You need your checkout process to be quick and easy to complete a purchase, which will help:
There is nothing better than visiting a website that puts you in the holiday mood.
For example, with Halloween approaching, Target does an excellent job updating its imagery to match the Halloween theme.
It’s also an innovative idea to build out gift guides, holiday FAQs, and holiday categories and optimize them to improve your customer experience, drive customers deeper into your website, and increase product purchases.
Don’t forget about your product reviews. It is highly recommended to have detailed reviews of your most popular holiday products, showcasing why they are needed, useful, and relevant and make great holiday gifts.
To make sure the holiday season is a success, start by reviewing your KPIs such as: 
The holiday season presents an excellent opportunity for ecommerce businesses to drive more sales and build customer loyalty.
To capitalize on the holiday season, it’s crucial to plan ahead and create an exceptional customer experience.
Work with your paid and social teams to develop a blended marketing strategy, run technical and security audits, and ensure a smooth checkout process.
Also, leverage email marketing and other tactics to drive incremental revenue and traffic while building lasting relationships with your customers for years to come.
More resources:
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OpenAI’s CEO and executives offered answers on Reddit that hint at what SEO for ChatGPT Search will look like
CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI executives held a Reddit AMA to answer questions, including those about ChatGPT Search, providing an inside look at how it works. Their answers offer insights into what SEO may look like in the immediate future.
The people from OpenAI answering the questions:
ChatGPT Search is not a search engine, it’s an AI chatbot with search, which means it doesn’t compete with Google as a search engine, it simply replaces it with something else that people already use for work and play. Now it has additional utility as an assistant in daily life and search.
Another advantage to ChatGPT Search is that it doesn’t show advertising nor does it follow users around the Internet. Users already trust ChatGPT with personal and business information so it’s already has goodwill with users.
What makes ChatGPT Search a threat to Google is that Users are already familiar with ChatGPT and have good feelings about it. Because it’s already in use there is no switching away from Google to break the habit of searching with Google.
In the Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit, a Redditor asked OpenAI CEO what the value of ChatGPT Search is over other search engines.
The person asked:
“My question is about the value ChatGPT Search offers compared to popular search engines. What are the unique advantages or key differentiators of ChatGPT Search that would make it worthwhile for a typical search engine user to choose it?
Sam Altman answered:
“For many queries, I find it to be a way faster/easier way to get the information I’m looking for. I think we’ll see this especially for queries that require more complex research. I also look forward to a future where a search query can dynamically render a custom web page in response!”
That bit about a “custom web page” is something to look out for because it hints at personalization based on what a user is searching for.
Altman’s response about ChatGPT Search’s handling of complex queries calls attention to an advantage over Google. ChatGPT users are accustomed to using natural language, whereas Google users habitually use keyword searches. Keyword searches disadvantages Google because it’s harder to understand those queries, which is why Google displays People Also Ask features in Search.
Natural language queries is the way users interact with ChatGPT and that is an advantage for ChatGPT Search.
The next question was about OpenAI’s progress on preventing ChatGPT from making things up (aka hallucinations) and also about how it’s going to incorporate fresh data to the index.
Both problems are generally approached with a technology and technique called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) which selects data from an up to date database like a search index or a knowledge graph and then provides that to the LLM-based chatbot to summarize and use as a base for an answer.
This is the question:
“Are hallucinations going to be a permanent feature? Why is it that even o1-preview, when approaching the end of a “thought” hallucinates more and more?
How will you handle old data (even 2-years old) that is now no longer “true”? Continuously train models or some sort of garbage collection? It’s a big issue in the truthfulness aspect.”
The answer was given by Mark Chen, SVP of Research
“We’re putting a lot of focus on decreasing hallucinations, but it’s a fundamentally hard problem – our models learn from human-written text, and humans sometimes confidently declare things they aren’t sure about.”
Mark Chen continued his answer by saying that they are getting better by the use of “grounding” which is something that Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps large language models with. Chen also reveals that they believe that using Reinforcement Learning (RL) may help models stop hallucinating.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a way to teach a machine with experience, rewarding it when it’s correct and withholding the reward when it’s not correct, thus reinforcing good answers. The machine “learns” by making choices that maximizes rewards. In the context of hallucinations, a reward could be a score or signal that indicates that the answer is factual (and it could also be provided by human feedback scores).
Mark Chen continued his response:
“Our models are improving at citing, which grounds their answers in trusted sources, and we also believe that RL will help with hallucinations as well – when we can programmatically check whether models hallucinate, we can reward it for not doing so.”
The next question is about what search data does ChatGPT Search use.
The question asked:
“Is ChatGPT Search still using Bing as the search engine behind scenes?”
The answer was provided by Rinivas Narayanan, VP Engineering at OpenAI:
“We use a set of services and Bing is an important one.”
That’s an interesting answer because it’s commonly assumed that Bing is the only search engine. The answer indicated that ChatGPT Search uses multiple “services” and that Bing is the most important. What are the other services that ChatGPT might use? That’s an open question.
Someone asked the important question about how to optimize content for ChatGPT Search in order to improve rankings. The question was answered by Kevin Weill who said that they were still figuring it out, which could mean that they don’t know or that they’re still figuring out what to say about optimization.
Kevin Weill, Chief Product Officer responded:
“This is a great question—the product just launched today so there’s a lot to figure out still about where search will be similar and where it will be different in an AI world. Would love any feedback you have!”
Chief Product Officer Kevin Weill is right, these are still the early days of their search and much can still change. The OpenAI Reddit AMA offers first hints at what SEO is growing into.
Other insights:
Beyond those takeaways is the consideration that OpenAI is not directly competing against Google with a standalone search engine, it has created a completely different experience for searching the web.
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Get to know Google Web Stories. Discover the features & benefits of Google’s immersive storytelling format and see whether it’s right for your brand.
Back in February 2018, Google announced AMP stories.
This visually rich, mobile-focused content format felt similar to the “stories” functionality popular on many social media sites.
The underpinning technology is based on the accelerated mobile pages that have been somewhat controversial in the marketing world.
In May 2020, Google rebranded AMP Stories as Web Stories, which they explain are “a web-based version of the popular Story format, allowing creators to host and own their content.”
Google Web Stories are a visual content format that can be shown across the internet.
You might find them similar to the stories on Instagram in that they allow creators to publish a succession of images, videos, and audio.
Web Stories are billed by Google as being “fully immersive” thanks to their ability to be viewed full-screen.
Some examples of Google Web Stories being used by brands currently include:
One thing that makes Google Web Stories fairly unique amongst the myriad of story-telling functionality found in apps is their ability to be seen across the web.
Whereas the likes of Instagram Stories need to be viewed on that platform, Google’s Web Stories can be hosted on a creator’s own website.
This gives publishers more freedom over what is contained in the story as there are no restrictions around content, unlike many apps.
It also means the story can be used to help to drive traffic to your site, not kept within the walled garden of social media apps.
One of the main benefits of using Google’s stories above other competitors’ social media story format is their accessibility from the SERPs.
Google Web Stories can be indexed like a web page and served as a Google search result.
In October 2020, Google announced that they were bringing Web Stories to Google Discover feeds in India, Brazil and the US.
The list of stories, called a “shelf” by Google, sits at the top of Discover.
Tapping on the story brings it to full-screen and allows the user to navigate through the list by swiping.
Because Web Stories are hosted on your own servers it means the content can be used across other digital assets, too, like emails and digital brochures.
Although the AMP technology the web stories is based on is designed for use on mobile devices, web stories can be viewed on mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers.
This increases their utility as there is no need to create desktop-friendly alternatives for responsive assets like websites.
Google is taking publishers by the hand and leading them through the creation of Web Stories.
There are several tools to help put them together and even comprehensive development notes for those who want to think more outside-the-box.
At their core, Google Web Stories are built using the Accelerated Mobile Pages format.
In fact, when you click on the link to the “Developer docs” from Google’s stories website, you’re taken to the amp.dev guides and tutorials page.
Web Stories require HTML mark-up to be valid.
They also can support optional mark-up to enhance the user experience. For instance, it is possible to use HTML mark-up make the story accessible in landscape mode and present it in a more immersive way on desktop.
When creating your web story, you need to set the metadata attributes.
These do not serve as the page title or description of the story but as a preview of the story where it is served across the web.
You can also add a page title, description, Open Graph data, and other elements to optimize your story for search and sharing; this is done through traditional HTML mark-up.
Google’s AMP Test tool will help you to identify if there are any errors with your story.
If your page cannot be validated as a Web Story, there are links to documentation and guidance to help you to rectify the problems.
Third-party tools can help you craft your Web Stories without needing a developer or design team on hand.
Two tools that Google links to from its Web Stories site are News Room AI and MakeStories – neither of which are run, or technically endorsed, by Google.
News Room AI gives creators a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) design functionality and a deal with Getty images that grants access to over 300 million images.
MakeStories boasts a zero-code, drag-and-drop functionality to customize your stories including access to Google fonts and “one-click filters” to edit your images.
Google has partnered with WordPress to create a plugin that allows publishers to create web stories directly on their WordPress site.
As the stories are built within the WordPress website, they will be included in the site’s XML sitemap allowing for easier discovery by Google.
The plugin also gives creators the ability to set their metadata for the story including cover image, excerpt, and logo.
ProductStories is an app that enables your Shopify pages to be converted into Web Stories.
Once the app is installed, an AMP version of each product page is automatically created.
A user can choose from two different themes or request a customized theme from the ProductStories team.
The format, versatility, and ease of creating Google Web Stories make these a beneficial medium for marketers to explore.
Here are the top 10 benefits and uses of the format.
As the stories can be hosted on a publisher’s own website, the copyright of the content is all theirs.
This means the topics they cover are entirely at their own discretion and without the strict limitations often seen in social media.
The use of the content is also at the publisher’s discretion; Google does not assume any rights over the content.
Google does have some restrictions on the content that can be published, most notable being the policy on content that is “overly commercial.”
It’s worth taking a look over the guidelines before creating your first story – especially if you are using it for promotional purposes.
Any ads that appear in a Google Web Story are controlled by the content creator.
That means unlike with the story functionality on social media apps, monetization of the content is entirely at the discretion of the publisher.
Therefore, if you host ads on your web story, you get 100% of the ad revenue.
Google recently released a programmatic ads solution for Web Stories through Ad Manager and AdSense.
A lot of social media sites with similar story formats dissuade content creators from linking out to other websites.
This usually means having to be creative in linking from the comments or bio.
With Google Web Stories, there are no such restrictions on linking out.
As Web Stories act like web pages, they can be linked to analytics platforms including Google Analytics.
This means there is a much greater level of tracking and user analysis available than on standard social media story formats.
This is an integral part of assessing how valuable Web Stories are to your marketing strategy.
Unlike AMP which is designed specifically for mobile devices, Web Stories can be responsive to any device type.
This means there is no need to create separate content for display on desktop devices or to suffer the loss of functionality on mobile.
Web Stories include the ability to host interactive elements such as quizzes and polls.
This is somewhat limited by your technical ability, as this functionality isn’t supported by all Web Stories creation platforms.
Given the immersive nature of the Web Stories, this added level of interactivity could make for an engaging experience.
Unlike some other Google content such as Google My Business posts, there is no expiration date on Web Stories.
They will not be deleted automatically after 7 days and won’t get lost in a timeline like on social media accounts.
You can feature your Web Story for as long and as prominently as you’d like.
Web Stories are designed to be easily indexed by search engines.
This means getting your content onto the first page of Google won’t require any additional work on your part beyond the standard SEO needed to get any web page ranking well.
There is also the opportunity for it to appear in the coveted Web Stories carousel if you are publishing content for India, Brazil, or the United States.
There are no design restrictions beyond making sure that Web Stories meet the general technical requirements.
This means you are free to choose fonts, colors, animations, and imagery that suits your brand’s style.
Using the “live-story” attribute on your Web Story will notify the user in real-time that you have added a new page.
This can be particularly useful if you are using the format to cover breaking news or developments.
Google Web Stories is a rich, engaging content format that boasts a lot of potential for marketers.
Unlike similar social media storytelling formats, Web Stories are not time-bound or limited to certain platforms.
The brand benefits of exposure via Google products including Search and Discover are worth exploring.
More Resources:
Helen manages the SEO team at Getty Images. She has a passion for equipping teams and training individuals in SEO …
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