I’ve already talked a lot about Web Stories as a concept; now it’s time for some practical advice. You don’t just want to create Web Stories, you want them to attract traffic and have high conversion rates, right? In this article, we’ll talk about the stage of preparing your Web Stories for publication – those important nuances that compose a Web Story that works.
1. Content is king
So, the first step in creating any web page is to select the content for it. Since a Web Story is a web page focused on visual effects, preparing the content is worth even more attention. Ideally, you should have a sufficient number of high-quality, pleasing to the eye and varied photos. Since Web Stories are viewed primarily from smartphones, vertical orientation of photos and videos is preferred.
So as not to bore the audience, keep your video within 15 seconds. Do not be afraid to add sound, audio tracks if you have them. They will only enhance the users’ experience.
Google representatives advise against making your Web Stories too long. However, if you want to place programmatic ads in them, you need to have at least 7 screens in each one.
2. Layout matters too
If you don’t have a skillful UX specialist with a developed sense of beauty to work on your layouts, don’t worry. To create a truly working web story, it is enough to adhere to a few simple rules:
- don’t overload screens with text. One idea = up to 200 characters per screen
- watch for readability. Eliminate too small fonts, pictures, line spacing; burning text
- use animation wisely.
When designing your Web Stories, keep in mind that they will look slightly different on devices of different sizes and resolutions. Fortunately, now we can get a preview for all popular mobile devices right in the browser.
3. Optimization is important
Do not forget that every web page has a part, that is invisible to the user but very important for the search engine. In this respect, a Web Story is no different from a regular page, except for some required elements:
- publisher name
- publisher logo
- poster.
It is better to use raster formats for these images. Don’t place any text on the poster, since Google itself imposes your title on it.
You can (and should!) add SEO tags, prescribe ALTs to images. These little words will make your story more attractive in the eyes of a search engine and, accordingly, will collect more traffic.
Besides, it is worth adding relevant meta-schemas and separate data for social sharing to enable word-of-mouth marketing.
4. Compress everything
Web Stories use a lot of visual content that can be heavyweight, so it’s important to compress large files. Web Stories are renowned for their loading speed, but big videos or even photos can easily ruin everything. Google representatives recommend keeping the video size within 2-3 MB, and I would also recommend not putting the video on the first screen. On subsequent screens, the video will have more time to load before the user reaches it.
Also, minify the HTML itself to make your Web Stories even faster. And of course, after all the manipulations with the code, do not forget to make sure that your Web Story passes the validity test.
5. Prepare for analysis
Analytics will come in handy for the following stages of working with Web Stories: promoting them and improving conversions. I will talk about that in my next articles, and now you only need to connect Google Analytics so that later you can track the results.
If you want to create Web Stories for your store or marketplace, but all of the above sounds too complicated and time-consuming, do not despair! Product Stories will gladly generate Web Stories for you and take care of all the necessary details 🙂 Feel free to fill the form below to get a quote:
