Google Web Story Strategies & SEO Best Practices [PODCAST]

On the new episode of Marketing O’Talk,  you’ll learn strategies that brands, publishers, and content creators can use to make engaging visual content with Google’s Web Stories.

We’re joined by three SEO experts to talk about how to build Web Stories, the best way to track them, and how to ensure users find them in the Google Search results or on Google Discover.

Meet our special guests:

• Greg Finn: Partner/Digital Marketer at Cypress North and Marketing O’Clock cohost.
• Glenn Gabe: SEO Consultant at G-Squared Interactive.
• Samuel Schmitt: Digital Solutions Expert.

Catch the episode on the Search Engine Journal YouTube Channel.

Give our experts one hour of your time and they’ll turn you into a Web Stories pro.

Bring Google Discover Traffic to Your Site With Web Stories

Finn explained why anyone who’s trying to get more organic traffic from Google Discover should be investing in Web Stories.

“When you’re using Google Discover, you do see that these stories are bigger and bolder than content that you typically find on Discover.

There is a story icon that shows up there, and I’d say it’s roughly 1.5x the size of a normal Discover article.

They’re grouped in sort of the same category (for example, recipes) and you can then swipe horizontally to go through different stories.”

Web Story Creation Tools

Schmitt tells listeners how Web Story building tools can help during the creation process.

“First you can start with templates. You can select a template and drag and drop images, text, and video. So you know Glenn and myself, we code Web Stories by hand.

You can do that, but a lot of people don’t code, so these kinds of tools are really great. In 15 minutes you can create a nice Web Story and publish it on your website.” 

Tracking Web Stories

On the show, Gabe walks listeners through how to track Web Story traffic in Google Analytics

“My recommendation would be to get basic tracking up and running first. Web Stories are going to register in GA just like any other page on your website.

You’ll quickly want to know what’s going on inside your Web Story because again it’s a series of pages, right?

So that’s when I dug deeper with the documentation because there wasn’t really good documentation on how to track what’s going on within Web Stories.

It ends up there is lots of functionality there that’s pretty easy to implement that would enable you to track a number of things.

You can actually see how far someone is getting in.

You can label those pages however you want as well so you can see where the dropoff is.

Is everybody dropping off at page 4 for some reason? Why is that?

Maybe there is a glitch there, maybe there’s a problem, maybe the content isn’t engaging, whatever it may be.

You could also track how many people get to the end of your Web Story, and then how many people get to the book end.”

If you want all the Web Story insights from the episode, you can watch the full discussion on the Search Engine Journal YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And, don’t forget to subscribe to Marketing O’Clock. We release new podcast episodes every Friday with the digital marketing news of the week.

More Resources:

• Google Discover Updated With Web Stories Carousel
• Google Discover: An Image Could Be Worth 1,000 Clicks [Case Study]
• Web Stories WordPress Plugin: 9 Must-Know SEO Tips

Featured Image Credit: Cypress North