How to make a healthy Google Web Story – A Recipe

How to Make a Google Web Story?

Creating a healthy Google Web Story is not so easy. To balance a healthy verse of a Web Story, you need to follow the best practices of Web Stories SEO while preparing them.

SEO isn’t enough to maintain a healthy diet of stories. You have to feed them all aspects like amazing designing skills, sufficient technical add-ons, interactive storytelling, and other miscellaneous fillings.

It’s been a long since Google launched a new home for Web Stories on the Discover application. People are creating a wide range of Web Stories such as travel, food, celebrity, news, and fashion stories.

The wonderful creation of Web Stories is achieved by significantly enhanced and interactive Web Story creation tools. With possibilities of multi-functional features, this tool helps you to build extraordinary Web Stories.

Tools such as MakeStories, StorifyMe, Google Web stories WordPress, and so many others help you to specialize in creating Google Web stories.

Regardless of which tool you choose, you must follow Google Web Stories SEO methodologies.

Web Stories are an open web visual storytelling format that allows you to combine video, audio, images, texts, illustrations, animations, and Gifs to create a completely new method to promote and learn something exclusively remarkable.

Google search has given first-class citizenship to Web Stories. This is something important to keep in mind and understand the value or weightage of Web Stories in Google search results.

Many major publications and brands, like USAToday, Forbes, BMW, Loreal, GQ, Vogue, Hindustan Times, The Dodo, People, America’s Test Kitchen, IndiaToday, NDTV, PopSugar, and many others, are leveraging Web Stories to get their stories out there on the open web.

If you want to create your own, follow these guidelines for creating engaging Google Web Stories.

Best practices of Creating Google Web Stories

These practices must be followed in terms of Design, story-telling, technical, SEO, third party integrations, web accessibility, and so on

1. Design

• The first thing to keep in mind while developing online stories is that the design should be unique and appealing to both the content and the audience.
• Keep your text to a minimum and avoid utilizing too many text walls, which can dull your design talents
• Ensure the text in your stories is visible to everyone without too many text blocks
• Bring life to your stories by adding various animations and Gifs relevant to your stories and content
• Make sure your users are enabled to follow the suggested actions like the call-to-action button directed by you. In other words, represent the CTA button in such a way that encourage users to initiate action immediately
• Avoid using fuzzy and muffled images or videos for your web stories. Instead, use high-resolution cover image and brand symbol to represent well
• Audible audio clips are also advised to use on Web Stories. Ensure your audio clips have balanced volume and a minimum of 5 seconds long life
• For a lean-back experience, keep the Web Story on Auto-advance mode

2. StoryTelling

• Choose a video-first approach. Video centric storytelling is one of the best ways of serving something to your audience than the image
• Be an apostle of your own story. Share facts and information relevant to your stories. Don’t mind sharing your opinion and experiences if you have any related to your story. It will keep your story engaging and highly readable
• Plan narration for your story. Introduction, facts, experiences, situations, suspense, opinions, and ideas keep everything in your stories concisely

3. Technical

• Keep your story AMP validated by using the AMP validator tool to keep your Web Story free from AMP validation errors. Your web stories must be valid AMP pages.
• Add the right size of 640x853px poster image or cover image in your src image attribute with an aspect ratio of 3:4
• The same goes for the size of the logo. It should be at least 96×96 px with an aspect ratio of 1:1
• Make sure the poster image of the Web Story is free from text blocks. Keep the concisely titled and visually rich poster image for your web stories to encourage CTR rates
• Keep the title short and descriptive with a minimum of 70 characters. Your title should be no more than 90 characters
• Ensure that you haven’t added any no-index attributes in your Web Stories. If there’s any, it will block Google from indexing your stories
• Instead, add your stories to your sitemap, it will help discover your stories on google search results

4. SEO

• Quality and unique content are all about good SEO practices for Web Stories. Content plays the most important role in SEO
• Include ALT image text to improve the visibility of Web Stories. Image ALT text attribute highlight your image title to understand search engine what the image is all about
• Use of Original image is highly recommended for every little aspect of your Web Story. The original image helps improve the visibility of the story
• Adding structured data in Web Stories is also recommended improving the visibility of your Web Story
• For video only stories, the video title should be written within title attributes on tags of your Web Story
• Also, add video captions for your story videos to help readers better understand your Web Story
• Follow all metadata guidelines related to titles, descriptions, meta tags, structured data, Twitter Cards, etc
• Integrating your Web Stories with your website is another important and good practice to follow to build up the SEO of your website and Web Stories as well
• Use AMP story page attachment gestures like SWIPE UP, CTA buttons, SEE MORE to add in-depth details for viewers
  Enable your landscape display support to view your Web Stories on desktop Google search results

5. Others

• Find a style that fits your aesthetic and set illustrations and animations to place things carefully.
• Animate your objects separately to keep your visuals captivating
• Use embeds. Embeds help you to provide additional dimensions within your Web Story pages
• Attract viewers with a cover of your Web Story. The cover should be reflective of what your brand speaks with a prompt title and appealing image
• The cover works as a packaging part of your Web Story. It should be appealing from every aspect
• Make sure your web story is accessible to all the viewers

Apart from this, I would like to share some Do’s and Don’ts that will initially help you to build a healthy yet competitive Web Story.

Conclusion

Web Stories can be hand-coded or you can build them using web stories creation tools.

If you want to build Web Stories by hand-coding, you can build them from scratch using the AMP framework. This is one of the vast and not recommended ways to build Web Stories.

Web Story creation tools are one of the best and highly recommended ways to build them.

Give yourself a chance to build them using tools like MakeStories and Google Web Stories WordPress plugin and on top of that, start applying healthy best practices of Web Stories that we’ve discussed above.

Building a Google Web Story by applying these best practices will increase the visibility to another level on the Google search engine