How Google Discover and Web Stories Boost Website Traffic

In 2016, Google introduced the Google Feed, its take on the social media feed. The aim was to provide relevant content to the mobile user without him having to search for it. This feed was accessed through Google app with mainly news, entertainment or sports related articles as the content. In September 2018, Google re-branded the feed as Discover.

With Discover, Google revamped the feed and implemented major design and analytical changes. Discover is accessible on Google.com on all mobile browsers and supported by Android and iOS. The content now appears, according to topics with headers like Food Photography, Interior Design, etc. and is tailored according to user’s expertise on a particular topic.

Powered by Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, Web Stories are visually appealing, fast-loading, mobile-focused and search engine-friendly Snapchat/Instagram like Stories. Laced with features like fast-loading pages, crisp content and rich visuals, Web Stories help publishers provide useful information in an engaging and engrossing format.

According to Google, its feed was used by 800 million users each month and after the Discover update, these numbers are sure to grow. With this strong user base, there is a lot of potential to increase the website traffic with Discover.

With Discover, Google is now focusing more on the visual content. So, images, videos, infographics will have more visibility than mere textual content. Web Stories, being a visually-driven content format launched by Google, is sure to dominate the Discover feed and eventually Google SERP.

Google's ultimate purpose with Discover is to surface relevant content to the user, even when he is not searching. This takes out the SEO factor. So, Google's ranking factors for Discover will be content quality, user engagement, and user interaction on the content.

To give itself more of a social media feel, Google introduced ‘Posts on Google’. With these posts, verified publishers can publish images, events, stories, GIFs and videos directly in Google Search. These posts appear on Discover under specific topics for a limited time period. To gain a slew of benefits, Web Stories make up for the perfect Google posts.

The bigger picture here is that Google wants to surpass all the social media feeds with Discover. As almost every social media platform has successfully harnessed the Snapchat-pioneered Stories format, Google is doubling down on Web Stories. Thus, to boost website traffic, it is a must to incorporate Web Stories and consider Discover as a potential platform.

Where and how to use Web Stories to boost traffic is of utmost importance, but first one should master crafting them. There is no better tool than the Web Story Builder by Visual Stories for the effortless creation of Web Stories. With the help of its intuitive and guiding interface and an extensive image library, anyone can masterfully create Web Stories.