Increase traffic and revenue for your food blog using the new google web stories feature. Learn how to set up google web stories for wordpress and bring traffic to your food blog.
What are Google Web Stories
Think Instagram stories or Pinterest idea pins but for google. Google web stories are full screen, visually rich content made up of multiple slides. To use Google web stories you simply tap through the stories to go from one slide to the next. The web stories are essentially hosted on your web site and can include video, text, images and even links.
Web stories are shown on the Google discover app, they can come up in google searches as well as google images.
They are a great way of sharing your content and can bring in a ton of traffic. On the first web story I created, I got an extra 1000 views the next day just from that one web story.
You can utilise all your SEO knowledge on google web stories which will only help your google web story to go further and ultimately bring in a little extra traffic.
How To Set Up Google Web Stories in Wordpress
The great thing about Google web stories is how easy it is to use. All you have to do to get going is to add the Google Web Stories plugin to your website and you're well on your way to creating your first web story.
There are tons of templates on the plugin to get you started and to help you find your way around.
How to Create Google Web Stories
1. Click on the create new story button or select a template.
2. Add a title for your story, this can be the name of your recipe.
3. Create the first page of your story with an eye capturing image and large title.
4. Add a link to your blog post on the first page.
5. Continue adding more pages.
I usually included a page with the ingredients and couple of pages with a few basic steps. Make sure that you don't give all the info away, you still want to make sure people click through to your blog post to get the full recipe/post.
6. Add a poster image and story description.
Use a poster image that will make people want to view your web story and use a SEO filled description.
7. Click publish and submit your story url to google search console.
How to Get Your Web Story Published and Approved
In order to make sure your web story gets the widest coverage you need to ensure everything is up to scratch. First you want to make sure that your web story follows all the basic guidelines. Web stories has their own built in checklist, so that's always a good place to start. They will let you know if the description is missing, if you need to add more text etc.
To find the checklist click on the checklist icon on the bottom of your screen.
Once you've got everything ready on your checklist, you can hit the publish button.
What you'll want to do next is to ensure that your web story gets seen and indexed by google. Head over to google search console and add the url to the bar at the stop for inspections. Google will then retrieve the data to see whether the url can be indexed.
Once Google has retrieved the data for your web story, go ahead and click on the request indexing button on the right.
Google Web Stories Examples
There are so many different formats for google web stories, so you'll have to see what works best for your food blog. Here are a few examples of google web stories from my website:
Tips For Creating Viral Google Web Stories
- Images are everything. Use eye catching beautiful imagery. Foodtography school has been a game-changer for me so definitely worth the investment.
- Don't forget about SEO. SEO is just as important for google web stories as it is in any other blog post.
- Test out the layouts. Create a few different layouts and templates and see which one work the best. Some web stories simply work better than others.
- Don't forget about video. We all know video is where it's at. So try to include some video into your web stories. My Blueberry Gin Cocktail web story went viral and I simply add a few snippets from my recipe video.
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