Google has come a long way in the past few years and has introduced many new apps and features. One of the latest ones is the “Google Web Stories” feature, which is also known as visual stories. It allows webmasters to post little snippets of information that will be included in the middle of the search engine results page for particular keywords. The form factor of these “web stories” will be similar to the stories that you find on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and other social media platforms. This new Google feature comes after Twitter recently announced it’s “fleets” feature that is similar to stories.
Who Should be Interested?
This new feature should come as a boon for all website owners and bloggers. Google has noticed the decreasing attention span in search and wants to give users as much information on a topic in as few words as possible. The company also encourages website owners to include ample number of images and video in their stories since they can give more info about the topic.
All these factors mean bloggers can drive traffic to their website through stories. It provides them with a new avenue by which they can appear in the first SERP for a keyword. Additional benefits of Google Web Stories is that they can be used to publish affiliate links as well as ads. This can mean an extra source of revenue for the website owners. If you are a digital marketer or part of a digital marketing company, you should take note of this feature and use it to drive traffic, leads and revenue for your client website.
How to Create Google Web Stories
If you use WordPress as your CMS tool, creating web stories is a breeze. You just need to install a plugin that has been officially released by Google and use it to create stories. You can easily insert images, text, video and audio into those using this plugin. It also allows you to add your logo, featured image, excerpt and other metadata.
There are a ton of customization options inside this tool. Once created, you can insert the permalink of the story into the source code and your web story will be published and embedded into a detailed blog of the same topic. An easier way would to insert a module into the page using a page builder like Guttenberg or Elementor and then inserting the URL there. However, if you do not use a CMS, you can create a web story using the guidelines provided here too.
Best Practices For Google Web Stories
Google has also laid out a framework that makes it easier to create web stories. It recommends the minimum number of slides in each story be 4 and the maximum is 30. Also, it recommends to not insert more than 10 words per slide and include images and videos to convey more information. Also, the wordings need to be in at least font size 24. Using captions for audio is highly recommended as people who are in noisy places can also view and understand the story. Lastly, it is mandatory to add important metadata like featured image, except and logo as these will be visible in SERP before a user clicks on the story.
