How Shopify E-commerce stores can boost organic traffic using Google Web Stories?
“Why aren’t my ads working???”
“I’m not getting any clicks.”
“I’m not getting any conversions.”
“I’m not getting any impressions.”
Even if your Store gets traffic from Google or Facebook Ads, the average order value is too low compared to the Ad spend. Customer acquisition costs via Ads have never been this high before, thanks to the e-commerce boom.
If you are playing the long game and realized you can’t keep burning money on Ads forever, SEO is the way to go.
If you want to continue getting cucked by Zuck, keep relying on Facebook Ads to generate sales for your business.
If you’re ready to build a business with real authority, notoriety, consistency, invest in the growth of your organic traffic. — Keval Shah | Ecommerce SEO 🛒 (@SEOKeval) April 23, 2021
Invest in the growth of your organic traffic via SEO. Play long games.
Tried SEO already? No traffic to your Shopify e-commerce store, even after publishing blog posts?
SEO is a good one but takes a long time to see results, generally. SEO is hard because it requires excellent content creation skills with a bit of technical chops.
If you haven’t already heard, Web Stories are being featured in Google Discover Feed. Google Web Stories is the best 2021 customer acquisition SEO hack.
The tappable story format has never been more accessible—to creators and readers alike with Google Web Stories.
Google Discover Feed is the most under-tapped organic traffic driver because Web Stories are featured by Google to its 800 million active Discover news ***feed users. ***
The example Web Stories carousel is geared towards lifestyle content. Some examples of other carousel categories are Beauty, Fitness, Celebrities, Wellness, Entertainment. source: https://blog.google/web-creators/web-stories-discover-search/
Lauren Nagel of Bonappeteach leveraged Google Web Stories to grow the traffic 7x in 60 days. Listen to her case study here:
Boosting traffic to the blog with Recipe web stories
Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, Pinterest’s Story pins, Twitter Fleets. Each social media platform has its own stories feature now.
Yet Google Web Stories is unique. Instagram stories expire in 24hours, whereas Google Web Stories can be published just like blog content that stays forever. Web Stories keeps driving traffic to your store forever.
Web Stories also appear in Google Search results. Just like any other SEO-optimized video or blog post content, Web Stories help your store rank higher. Web Stories are included in Grid View and also as a single search result.
SEO is only a way of distributing good stories. SEO and Storytelling are friends.
Google Web Stories are highlighted in Grid View and as a single search result
It will make your store stand out from the competitors and piques users’ interest. As a result, your store will have more visitors.
How do you get Web Stories featured on Google Discover?
Google Discover Feed shows users content related to their interests, based on their Web & App Activity.
We analyzed hundreds of stories featured on Google Discover and observed below commonalities:
- length of videos is less than a minute.
- less than 50 words per slide.
- has a good story arc.
- one or no direct links to your products.
- from trustworthy sites (high Doman Authority).
- tells a story well, or provides unique insights.
- Stories belong to one of these industries: Beauty, Fitness, Celebrities, Wellness, Entertainment.
Is your store catering to one of these industries? So why not leverage it to your advantage and harness it to drive traffic and sales for your site?
If you are selling food or beverages, create web stories with a focus on health benefits. Food recipe stories are one of the most commonly picked stories by Google Discover feed.
If you are selling Fitness equipment, create web stories on various types of workouts.
If you sell Clothing related products, showcase a list of celebrities wearing similar model clothing. Users who view this story are interested in Fashion. There you go, you have acquired most opportunistic leads from the funnel directly. Google Discover Feed takes care of identifying and personalizing according to the interests of users, so the people visiting your shop from Web Stories are already looking for a shop like yours.
Best practices to create effective Web Stories
Another page of Google guides instead explains what are the best practices recommended to achieve successful Web Stories. Among the suggested actions are:
- Use videos, which are more engaging than text or images (that can still complete the content).
- Do not create pages full of text (the so-called walls of text) and try to reduce the text to about 280 characters per page (the length of a tweet).
- The text** must not be blocked** by other contents on the page.
- All text must be visible to the reader and kept within limits. Avoid burning in the text, so as to prevent it from being locked when it is resized to fit various device sizes.
- Using animations can create involvement, but it is best to avoid annoying or repetitive animations that can cause fatigue.
- Titles must be shorter than 90 characters (preferably below 70) and descriptive.
- Web Stories must be valid AMP pages
- Keeping the poster image text free, because “this could obstruct the title of the story when users preview it in search results. If users are not able to clearly read the title, they may be** less likely to continue reading**“.
- Like any web page, providing high-quality content that is useful and interesting for readers is the most important thing: you have to include a complete narrative and follow the best storytelling practices to keep readers engaged.
Just like Pinterest, Google Web stories drive a good amount of traffic to your store. But what is the use of traffic that does not convert to sales?
You can get past this problem by keeping as much low friction as possible between the web story content and your checkout page. Immerse the Buy Now prompts into the web story content. Though, you don’t want to overdo this because the story might be considered commercial and Google Discover can ignore the story.
How can you get started with leveraging Web Stories for your shop?
If you have in-house design/developers & content writers, you can get web stories created by working through developer documentation. There are no-code tools like wordpress plugin , makestories and newsroom ai to create generic web stories using WYSIWYG editors.
If you own a Shopify store, check out Shopify WebStories app that generates web stories based on your product descriptions. It repurposes your customer reviews, Instagram posts & comments, video testimonials, influencer promotions to WebStories. If you had seen a spike in traffic/sales after an influencer promotion but that subsided over time, you can still leverage the impact of those promotions forever by repurposing the content and publishing it as Web Stories.
WebStories are seamlessly published right on your shop’s domain just like Shopify blog posts. By publishing on your own domain, these webstories start ranking your site for new keywords boosting the SEO traffic to your shop.
Learn to create web stories by subscribing here.
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