Google Stories is a lucrative way for you to gain traffic | Ep. #5

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

Google has released for some months ago what they call Web stories and what we other call Google Stories, it is, as you know it, from Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, as we have previously discussed in the podcast, it is basically a video everywhere from one second to however long you want it to be. However, it is not a video where you record yourself or you can if you do. But that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose of it is to could be make teasers.

I will get back to that. This is still a fairly new feature from Google, which means that it’s not very competitive. And if you want in on this, it should be right now you should get started and it’s not so difficult to get started. I will get back to that later.

Everyone who wants to try it out should definitely do it. I’m personally using it at the moment. I haven’t seen the biggest results yet, but I’m starting to gain some traffic from my stories and I’m trying to figure out how to do this the right way. And I think I have the right template for you guys I will share in the end of this episode. So Google Stories are meant to be used as teasers. It can be used as full story templates, but it’s meant as teasers and I personally use it for my blog post.

And if I make podcasts or videos, I make a Google Story to each one of these content types, as a teaser. So let’s say that I make a blog post about the best project management tools out there. Then I would take 50 percent, maybe less of the tools I have written about in this blog post. And then I would put them into a Google Story. I would put maybe a beginning slide where I make a short teaser for what is Google Story about.

Then I would make a slide about the first tool, second tool, if that’s it.

And then I would end with a slide that would link to my blog post, because if they end on the last slide, it’s highly likely that they like what they have read and they want to read more. 

And as you see, that’s a backlink directly in to your story sorry, your blog post from your story. So you can use these Google stories for everything. You can use it as teasers for your blog, post your videos, podcasts, actually any type of content. 

These Google stories are displayed. Many places they are displayed in Google Discover they are displayed. When you open Google Chrome, you have possibly seen this news section, which is on the start page. That’s Google Stories. Google stories are also shown in between the search results when you search on the phone. So if you search on something that’s related to a Google story out there, Google will show this Google story in between exactly like we see on YouTube when we search for a video, then we see these small stories in between our video results. 

It’s exactly the same lastly they are shown in the image search. Exactly. Works the same way. If you search for something that is related to a Google Story, this Google story will be shown in between the image results. Make a notice. Here it is only on the phone. So how do you create your first Google Story? It is not that difficult if you use WordPress, if you don’t use WordPress, it can be quite difficult. 

But Google has made an official plugin to WordPress and it has been in beta for quite a while. But recently it was released to the public and now it’s up for everyone to use it and it’s very easy to use it. However, it is still new in the market, so it still needs a lot of work to become a very professional tool. For instance, you cannot use your own custom fonts at the moment. So they have made a lot of different templates in this plugin that you can start out of. 

And when you make your first story, you will notice that it takes quite a while because you need to change all colors to be your profile. The font to be the closest to your font. You need to upload your logo. You need to make a description and so on, so on. So the first time you do it, please set some time aside to make this. However, the next times you do it, it’ll be fairly easy because you now have a template to work out for. 

So when you make your stories, there are some pro tips, first of all, you need to make a very good description. It’s like a meta description as we know it from a blog post. It’s just for your Google Story. And this is used for Google to know what the story is about. And of course, you also put text in your Google Story. And Google will also use this to know what it’s about. But the meta description is like an overall description of your Google Story. 

Last but not least, you should add a story image. And it’s so important in this size three to four. What that means is that, for instance, it could be width 750 pixel and then height one thousand pixels. It’s extremely important you follow these guidelines. Furthermore, when you have made your story, if you use the plugin, there is a tab called checklist. In this checklist, you can see all the recommendations from Google on how to make a Google story that is optimised fully to what it is Google are looking for. 

So thank you for listening. I hope it’s been helpful. And let’s catch up on the next one.