Google Web Stories On WordPress

by Joseph Graves | Dec 18, 2021 | Articles, Contracting, Tools, Website Management, WordPress

What Are Google Web Stories?

Before covering the use of Google Web Stories on WordPress, we first need to look at what Web Stories are. If you’ve used Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, you should be familiar with the “story” format where viewers tap or swipe between screens containing video, images, and text. Google Web Stories are a web-based version of that format, that can be hosted on your website rather than on a social media account.

Why Use Them?

If you have a small business website then web stories may help you achieve your business goals. It’s well worth the time to learn more about these stories and all of their perks or hire a WordPress website management company like us to do it for you.

Here are the top 3 reasons to use Google Web Stories:

Engagement. The story format has proven to be an engaging medium that people will watch and read.
Ownership. Maintaining control over your content is growing increasingly important, in this age of uncertainty – especially for businesses.
SEO. Web stories give you another way to attract organic search traffic, one that is currently far less crowded than other channels.

Google web stories open up all kinds of opportunities with images and video clips. This is one of the principal ways they aid brands that wish to showcase relevant and meaningful ideas consistent with their messaging.

The reach of Google web stories goes beyond the website they are created on. Not only do they show up in a standard Google search, but stories are seen in the images section of Google as well. People can learn about them via both Discover and classic search. Discover is the name of an app that’s suitable for mobile applications.

Why Do They Work?

Why do these stories stand out online? They’re not exactly like Facebook or Instagram stories, but because they use a similar visual format, most viewers are already familiar with them. This short-form visual content was created and perfected on social media platforms and is highly engaging.

Viewers are already accustomed to the format, so when a web story comes up in a Google search, it’s very familiar and easily understood. Because a majority of web searches are coming from phones these days, the story format is designed to display on mobile devices.

If you’re a business owner who is looking to motivate the members of your audience to purchase a specific product or service, then you may use Google Web stories for all sorts of reasons. You may want to include a CTA that directs people to sign up for your mailing list, subscribe to a monthly service, or buy a product.

Examples of Google Web Stories from https://stories.google/showcase/

How To Use Google Web Stories

There are several ways to use Google web stories in your content strategy. The most common is to use the short form format of a web story to direct users to either a call to action or longer-form content. Because the stories are easy to tap, it’s the perfect medium for a mobile phone.

Web Story Best Practices

Video First. Use video in the 9:16 ratio to keep your content engaging.
Be Concise. Keep your text as short as possible to keep it scannable.
Make it Readable. Use large text and contrasting colors.
Be Authentic. Use your voice to keep viewers engaged.

Google Web Stories For WordPress

The easiest way to get started with Google Web Stories on WordPress is to use the official Google Plugin made by the Google web stories team. The plugin gives users the power to set up web stories without having to leave their WordPress site. This integration also makes it simple to post web stories directly onto your website.

Using the Google Web Stories editor for WordPress, you can easily create your own web stories from templates or start fresh with a blank canvas. These visual narratives allow tappable interactions and can be shared easily across the web.

By creating web stories on your WordPress website, they belong to you and your company instead of being locked inside a closed platform.

Upon installation, the plugin also sets up a default archive for all your web stories at yourwebsite.com/web-stories. This is useful if you want to create a separate archive that puts all your stories in one place and is easily accessible from a menu.

Web Stories Editor

The Web Stories editor for WordPress is a powerful and user-friendly creation tool. If you have used the WordPress editor, navigating the web stories editor will be similar. Because the plugin lives on your WordPress installation, users can easily access their images in the media gallery. The only exception to this is when setting the default logo, which asks for the file to be uploaded.

Some of the key features are:

A visually rich and intuitive dashboard, allowing you to easily navigate the story creation process
Beautiful and expressive page templates to you get your story creation process started quickly and smoothly
Easy drag-and-drop capabilities, making it easy to compose beautiful stories
Convenient access to WordPress’ media library, enabling you to grab your media assets right from the plugin dashboard as you create your stories
Customizable color and text style presets, making it easy to tailor the style of your stories to the needs of your content strategy

Creating a Google Web Story on WordPress

Making a web story is super simple. If you haven’t done it before, the easiest thing to do is use a template. This still affords you full control over typography, colors, images, animations, and links, but you don’t have to figure all those out before starting.

The main elements for each story are:

Background
Title
Text

After you get comfortable creating and editing these elements, you can start to incorporate:

Buttons
Links
Animations

Web Stories Links

Links are one of the best features of web stories. Viewers like the visually engaging content, but some topics need more than an image to explain. In this case, you can use a web story as an introduction to a topic, and link to longer-form content.

Links can be added to a variety of elements from titles to text and backgrounds.

Web Stories Buttons

Adding a call to action is similarly simple to adding links. This is a great option if you are using web stories to attract potential customers for a product or service.

Google Web Stories + Google Site Kit = ❤️

If you are using the WordPress Google Web Stories plugin, installing the Google Site Kit plugin makes it super easy to connect your Analytics, Search Console, AdSense, Optimize, Tag Manager, and PageSpeed Insights. If you already have the Site Kite plugin installed, the Google Web Stories plugin will automatically detect and import the settings.

Download the Google Web Stories Plugin Here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/web-stories/

Download the Google Site Kit Plugin Here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/

Monetizing With Web Stories

Because Web Stories is a Google product, it integrates tightly with other Google services like AdSense. Including ads on your web stories is super simple once connected. This visual, mobile-friendly design of web stories is a great way to integrate ads into your content.

Google Web Stories For Small Businesses

If you’re a small business owner, Google web stories can help attract more visitors to your website. If done well, these stories can materially increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and lead to more revenue. Search Engine Optimization is one area where small businesses can compete with larger companies, and Google Web Stories are a relatively new format that isn’t nearly as competitive as other channels.

Recent Project: Website for Asset Manager WestEnd Advisors

by Joseph Graves | Mar 8, 2015 | Financial Adviser, Mutual Fund, Portfolio

New Website for RIA WestEnd Advisors

WestEnd Advisors is an RIA in North Carolina specializing in top down macroeconomic investing. Due to the scope of work, we partnered with Ulicny Financial Communications and Strategy to revamp their old website and brand messaging.

How we Helped

There are lots of firms that design websites – some even specialize in investment manager, mutual funds, and financial advisors. Ulicny’s has deep experience in financial marketing and we posses unique insight into the investment industry. Because of our collaboration, we were able to distill WestEnd’s particular style and philosophy into meaningful messaging for each of their client verticals.

The first part of the project was to work on their brand messaging. The goal was to position the firm’s unique attributes in a way that would be attractive to the broker / dealers and Wirehouses that are their customers. Especially relevant, was the need to make a strong case to the gatekeepers at the parent firms as well as the advisors that would be allocating client assets. It was an interesting challenge to make the material sophisticated enough to gain acceptance while remaining accessible to the rank and file.

With the messaging in place, the next phase was to refresh the website. First of all, we created custom graphics and layouts that emphasized the data driven focus of the firm. Because of their multi layered strategy it required several iterations to distill into digestible nuggets, but we got it done. As a result, we kept the structure of the site simple and easy to navigate, while still being informative.

In conclusion, the success of any project is a direct result of the caliber of the parties involved. Our team of vendors, along with the clients, collaborated across thousands of miles to achieve the goals.

Websites for RIAs and Asset Managers

If you’d like to get better results from your website, digital marketing, and print communications maybe you should contact us? You’d be hard pressed to find a team better suited to grow your AUM while efficiently serving existing clients. Most of all, we love a challenge!

Help Fight Hosting Deficiency Syndrome

by Joseph Graves | Apr 25, 2014 | Articles, PSA, Workshed News

Help Fight HDS #thereishope

About Hosting Deficiency Syndrome

Hosting Deficiency Syndrome (HDS) is a serious problem plaguing the WordPress community. Symptoms include slow page load times, the need for caching plugins, poor security, out of date WP installations, terrible customer service, and more.

Fortunately there is hope.

The treatment for HDS is Managed WordPress hosting from www.GetFlywheel.com. Their dedicated team of hosting professionals will migrate your site for free and have your website operating better in no time.

If you, or a company you know suffers from HDS, please contact them today.

About Flywheel

Flywheel is an amazing WordPress hosting company based in Omaha, Nebraska (AKA The Silicon Prairie). They do an awesome job of managing WordPress hosting for design firms like us at Workshed.com. If your website is built on WordPress, check them out (Also they do free migrations, which is very, very, helpful).

CONTACT FLYWHEEL

About Workshed

We approach design, marketing, and websites from a business owners perspective. Sure, we love cool tech just as much as the next geek, but we know that providing solutions to real business problems is a better way to provide value.

CONTACT WORKSHED

Kitchen Electric Testimonial

by Joseph Graves | Mar 28, 2014 | Testimonial

Great Clients = Great Projects

Now that their site has been up and running for a few months, we asked Paul and Sara Kitchen, owners of Kitchen Electric in Washougal, WA to share their experience of having a website built by Workshed.

Thank you Paul and Sara for sharing your thoughts!
Here is a more comprehensive account of what we did for them.

How to Pick Your Next Blog Post Topic for Financial Advisers (and other Businesses)

by Joseph Graves | Mar 4, 2014 | Articles, Financial Adviser

How to Pick Your Next Blog Post Topic for Financial Advisers

Writing a blog post with any regularity is challenging. Writing for your business needs to generate results in order to justify the investment in time and effort. A few years ago one of the companies in my portfolio was in the news and I wrote a post about my thoughts on the potential consequences. Mainly I did it because I was sick of repeating myself to clients on the phone so I thought that writing a blog post about it would save me some time. While it may have saved me a little time and prevented some boredom, it wasn’t until several months later that I discovered the real benefit.

The Long Tail

One afternoon while I was checking my blog stats instead of making calls, I noticed some search traffic related to the investment I had written about months before. It wasn’t much, but it was the first time I’d noticed organic traffic for something so specific. For months I’d get a hit or two every few days, nothing significant, but it was consistent. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d stumbled on to what’s now commonly referred to as “long tail keywords.”

By this time I’d already read Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More,” but I didn’t connect the dots between selling things and search terms. Essentially its the same thing. People are searching for something they want, be it products or information. Similar to the way you can find almost any product on Amazon…Google does the same for information.

Why It Matters

Google has an army of brilliant engineers trying to make sure you get good information when using their search engine. If you write something that is relevant to a question someone asks in Google you stand a good chance of getting found…assuming the question they are asking is specific enough IE a long tail question. In the example I used earlier, the particular investment I wrote about wasn’t well known, and when people started searching about it, there wasn’t much information available so my blog post was ranked high enough in the search results to get read.

Leveraging the Long Tail

I blogged sporadically over the next few years, but in 2013 I put what I learned about long tails to good use. An investment in my portfolio was making plans to go public and the information they were providing was vague and confusing. Recalling what I had observed a few years prior, I tried to identify questions people would be asking about the investment. Whenever the company released new information, I’d write a blog post. Eventually I created a special page on my website so people could easily read through all the information I’d collected.

Yreka!

At one point in my little experiment, I was ranked on the first page in the search results and I was getting over 500 page views a day. I realize that this isn’t much traffic in the grand scheme of things, but these were people who had no idea who I was…and they were asking me for advice. Some of my posts from that period had dozens of comments which led to multiple phone conversations with people who needed my help.

Your Turn

The next time you are trying to pick your next blog post topic, be sure to check your analytics to see if there are any search terms you can use as a starting point. If you don’t have that kind of data (contact me), try to recall recent questions from clients. Is there something there you can write about?

Let me know how it works for you, I’d love to hear your stories or answer any questions.

If writing blog posts isn’t your thing that’s cool too, we’d be happy to do it for you! Email us at [email protected] and we can set up a time to talk.

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