Storytelling best practices
As mention! earlier! storytelling is the most important quality in creating Web Stories and here’s a summary of the best practices Google puts forward for this:
Video first: Use as much video as possible! and supplement with images and text.
Bring your perspective: Go beyond the facts. Share your opinions. Be the protagonist of your own story.
Make it relatable
Feature people your target audience phone number database can relate to and trust in your footage.
Narrative arc: Create suspense in your story from one page to another. Bring the user along in the journey by providing context and narrative. Deliver payoff for sticking with you to the end.
Above all! Google wants you to use as much video as possible to tell your stories while using images and text to supplement your footage.
Google also recommends using a narrative arch to capture attention and you’ll find some more advice on this in an article we publish! on The Drum: How to capture and keep user attention with high-performance YouTube ads.
As with story formats for other platforms! Google also says you should put yourself at the centre of the narrative. Make your stories personal and don’t be afraid to promote your opinions or make recommendations. This is a format where users are generally open to
Advice and guidance so take advantage of this in your messaging.
Design best practices
When it comes to the design of your the md marketing digital team is made Web Stories! Google has a long list of best practices to follow – so refer to the full documentation. We’re not going to list all of the best practices here but you can find all of the items list! as “critical” in the guidance material:
R!uce your character count: Avoid including multiple pages with walls of text. Consider r!ucing text to approximately 280 characters per page (the length of a tweet).
Don’t block text: Make sure text is not block! by other content on the page. Avoid burn! in text; by not using burn! in text! you prevent text from being block! when it gets resiz! to fit various device sizes.
Keep text within bounds: Ensure that all text in your Web Story is visible to the reader.
Use animations mindfully: Bring your stories to life with animations but avoid distracting or repetitive animations which can cause fatigue.
As you can see! the majority of these critical best practices relate to the use of text and Google wants you to keep things to a minimum. If you’re already creating stories for platforms like Instagram and ! you should be us! to design principles like these.
Text should only be us! as a supplementary element in your stories
Us! to reinforce the key points or usa b2b list highlight key moments in your video. Take the time to !it your text and remove any unnecessary wording! simplify your language and use short words! abbreviations or expressions to say more with fewer characters.
The web-bas! architecture of Google’s Web Stories opens up new SEO opportunities – not only in terms of visibility but also driving valuable traffic to your website. Once again! Google has dozens of SEO best practices list! in its documentation for Web Stories and you’ll find the ones list! as critical below:
All Web Stories must be canonical. Make sure that each Web Story has a link rel=”canonical” to itself.
Attach metadata: Make sure that your Web Stories follow the AMP story metadata guidelines. Include markup that you would normally include on a web page: title! meta description! etc.
In addition to the critical best practices above! Google also recommends including structur! data in your Web Stories and the usual guidance you would expect for video content. For example! you should include alt-text for any images us! and add subtitles/captions (not burn! in) to make your stories more accessible.
