Google Web Stories: 10 mind-blowing tips for Beginners

Google web stories are the new trend in blogging. It helps you share snippets of your article in a more visual and interesting way

Below guide and the related posts in our Google web stories category would help you setup stories from scratch and get discovered in google search. Even if you don’t read all, you should focus on below pointers to play your strategy in building an awesome web-story:

Table of contents:

By just looking at the list above, you would have understood what is expected from you when you start creating google web stories. So, without wasting much of your time, lets get started:

1. Introduction & best in class examples

As the name suggests, web-stories are visual way of representing, sharing the article or news you have. You might have seen stories already in your facebook or instagram handles. Google webstories are the advanced version to the stories you see in FB or Instagram accounts. Yes, you can definitely match them with the reels though.

Without wasting your time further on the knowledge of what is google web-stories, let’s quickly dive into the best in class examples of web-stories.

• Google has published few guidelines (or you can call them suggestions) for creating a UI friendly web story. What is UI Friendly? Any page/service which is user friendly and can load on any type of device, users can scroll and experience your product (in simple terms).

Now let’s look at few of the best in class examples of web stories:

Portland band YACHT experiments with artificial intelligence and music

Intel’s leaked new generation processor

China’s into AI & Innovation

View all stories

Above 3 stories which I created recently – I have made lot of errors (and of-course because I didn’t refer to any training materials/guidelines available). Do have a look and let me know what all things I have missed.

Okay, before understanding that – here is a visual guide to your creating first web story.

Hope you understood from the above picture what is required in your google web story. If not, here is a quick look:

• Have a logo built for your webpage/website. You can try different online platforms to build a logo. We would go through this in detail in next pointer.
• Add a good looking higher size cropped image to be used as poster of your web story. Make sure the post gives some visual about what is going to be inside your stories.
• Create a title, try limiting it under 40 characters for better visibility
• Add your website/webpage details (Make it shorter). I use “Itsjustai.in“.

2. Being Efficient in story creation – Less than 5 minutes

Timing is the key. You should not invest too much of your time to create web-stories. Think it like this way. How much time do you spend to view one story?

In order to meet the timeline and be more efficient – few of the techniques you can use as suggested below.

• Create a logo for your web page/website. You can use Canva and if possible – do subscribe to their pro version for better availability of templates & contents.
• If you use wordpress, do add web-stories wordpress plugin. You can also use other google web stories plugin such as makestories or newsroom.ai. However, web stories wordpress plugin is advised to use for websites hosted on wordpress.

Let’s look at how to make google web stories:

• Use Getty Images to source the high quality images for your web-story. You can use other sources too. Make sure to remove the personal information after clicking on properties on any image and removing all the copyright info in order to better make that image recognized in google search.
• Keep general fonts while describing your webstory. It should be readable to end users
• Have a consistent flow of text size & images. If you want to use different images in each page, make sure the images are relevant to the post.
• Add few animations in the text. You can know more about this in our web stories builder guide
• To start with, you can use the readily available templates in webstories builder.
• Write an outline of your post. You can do that in your word doc (Mostly plan about the content of your webstory). This can start by planning an intro, then preparing the content (tool prep) followed by drafting the story
• Make sure to add alt text, description and add poster on your webstory.

3. All features explained about google web-stories (What makes them different?)

Before discussing the differences between Web-Stories and standard Native App Stories, it would be worthwhile to point out what is the same, namely the overall consistent user experience.

When opening a Web Story, every user who has previously read stories of any sort should feel completely at home. You swipe to move to the next story if there is one, tap to move ahead and backward, slide up to open a page attachment, and so on.

But there are two big categories of differences that I want to talk about.

1. Fundamental Differences
2. User-facing product features

Fundamental Differences: Vision for webstories is to have high quality content in mind. Not to talk about what you ate today (unless it’s bit interesting).

In contrast to social app tales, with web-stories you compose one narrative with numerous pages on a topic and post it all at once instead of just adding a single page at a time. Let’s look at some of the features it has to offer:

• Web-stories don’t expire unlike social app stories.
• These are your stories, you host them and have full control of making changes at any point of time.
• When it’s your content, you have copyrights and your rules would apply
• Because they are your’s, and published on web – there are no editorial restrictions.
• You can create whatever the way you would like the content to be published (No formatting guidelines)
• You get paid. Yes, web-stories can be monetized as they act like your blog posts and would keep on generating revenue forever provided regular visits
• Since, web-stories live on web, there is openness. Means, open access, consumption and creation
• Webstories technically act like web pages, they get indexed by Google and other search engines (Social app stories doesn’t)
• Highly customizable.
• Links to your main blog posts
• Flexible with all device types
• Can become live stories and may include quizzes and polls

I hope you enjoyed the google web stories examples and it’s features? Atleast, now you won’t have questions about what are google web stories.

Let’s head over to next post to understand more about point no 4 and onwards. Yes, once you are done with all concepts, we are going to share about google web stories seo as well.

Google Web Story amazing tips Part 2