Available for more than a year already, AMP stories are now set to get their own dedicated carousel in Google’s SERP. This was confirmed on 17 April during the AMP conference held in Tokyo.
AMP Stories now appears in a dedicated section in search results for general queries such as “things to do in Tokyo”. It’s a new opportunity to attract users in SEO. #ampconf
— Kenichi Suzuki (@suzukik), 17 April 2019
AMP stories: what are they?
If you are not familiar with AMP pages, all you need to know is that this is an open-source web page format offered by Google. Its main purpose is to improve the user experience by offering web pages that load faster with an interface optimised for mobile. AMP stories, for their part, are a form of enriched video that loads at lightning speed and sits directly in Google’s SERP (search engine results page)! Yes, this really is an off-site element. Note, however, that the stories shown to you on the search engine page depend on your query. Through these stories, AMP promises “an immersive and engaging experience”! The recipe is simple: engaging visual content, animations prompting the user to click to see more, and calls to action to point towards specific landing pages. In these AMP stories you can therefore include images (JPEG, GIF, etc.), background music or even video, all accompanied by the text of your choice!
As it happens, this feature is nothing new. On the contrary, it closely resembles what Snapchat does with its “Discover” section. The purpose is the same: you can swipe one way or the other through video sequences to consume news. This format is particularly well suited to storytelling (telling a story through your communications) and even to “documentary” content! In short, the idea behind these AMP stories is to engage internet users, so even though the feature has not been mentioned, we can expect AMP to soon offer voting within AMP stories.
What does it look like?
As mentioned above, this feature has been available for a while; the novelty lies in where these stories are placed. These short videos have a vertical format and highly visual content with plenty of interaction. Although these stories are more optimised for mobile use, they would also be available on desktop! At least that is what we understand from the AMP story examples offered on the AMP website, which are available on desktop. This remains anecdotal — you can clearly sense that this type of content is designed first and foremost for mobile consumption; indeed, the content displays full screen on that category of device.
How do you create an AMP Story?
You might expect Google to let you set up your story directly from the Google My Business mobile app or from Google Bulletin. That would indeed be quicker, since you could take a photo, a selfie or even a video of whatever you want and then share it from a single device: your smartphone. That is what Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook have taught us in how we understand the word “story”. If Google is looking to imitate them, it would be in its interest to make access to this type of content easier — content which, let us remember, is meant to be ephemeral!
This observation is certainly interesting, but it would remain very complicated to implement, because the “story” you want to create must be hosted on your server (and then cached by Google’s CDN, as with classic AMP pages), so for that you need to publish your content from your own website. Enough philosophy: to create and set up an AMP story you will have to use AMP HTML markup. If you already know the AMP technology, this will not be too complicated for you: you simply use the relevant tag and fill it in with the fields that are relevant to you. AMP offers fairly comprehensive documentation on this subject here.
Creating your AMP Story with WordPress
To you, inbound marketers, bloggers and other content publishers: if you use WordPress (a CMS we use a lot), you can use the official AMP plugin. It is the same plugin used to create your AMP pages, except that it received an update to version 1.1.1 following the AMP conference of 17 April 2019. Very handy, this extension will therefore let you configure and publish your stories without inserting a single line of code! The small snag is that this plugin requires the latest version of WordPress and relies on the Gutenberg editor.
In response to the experience offered by Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, Makestories lets you customise your stories with libraries of GIFs, pre-designed templates, background music and so on. It is also a tool that allows you to create your AMP stories without inserting a single line of code, thanks to a very intuitive drag-and-drop system. There is one small point to note about this tool: it is still in beta. The advantage is that it is compatible with both WordPress and Drupal!
Google, the search engine that always wants more
It would seem that Google is determined to ride the social media wave! Although Google Plus closed on 2 April, the search engine still encourages its users to do community management through posts and other publications on their Google My Business page. Indeed, the Google Bulletin app was created for that very purpose. You can thus manage your Google My Business page, create posts, reply to comments and therefore manage part of your online reputation from your smartphone. With AMP stories, this ambition becomes even clearer!
By continually optimising the user experience on the search engine results page, one may also wonder whether, in the near future, clicking on the blue links will still be of any interest to internet users. This thought may be ahead of its time, but it is legitimate nonetheless. More and more, we see that internet users are satisfied with the answer provided in the Knowledge Graph, in featured snippets (which is, incidentally, the content read out by voice assistants), or even in the headlines of articles shared on social media, without clicking through. This observation is the result of an analysis of a survey of internet users under 40, 72% of whom were based in the United States.
Other announcements linked to AMP Conf 2019
The key takeaway is that Google is increasingly seeking to promote its AMP technology, available since 2016. The AMP plugin update and the stories carousel were not the only news announced on 17 April! AMP also announced that it had found a solution called signed HTTP exchange to display the canonical URL of a piece of content on an AMP page, thereby resolving this serious debate around Google’s appropriation of content. It also appears that custom JavaScript is now possible on AMP pages thanks to a dedicated tag. Watch this space…
