Should you add a video to your business website? It’s not a must, but it certainly does make an impact – not only on customers, but on your site’s search engine presence. Read on to learn more about the right and wrong ways to use video on a website, as well as its benefits.
Right and Wrong Website Video
Like any other website tool, there are ways to employ online video that will help your customers and entice new prospects to contact you. On the other hand, there are wrong approaches that will cause people to stop watching or click away from your site.
What works:
- Short, powerful clips that educate
- Videos that illustrate your business or provide helpful solutions for visitors
- Professionally recorded and/or edited videos
- Clear, crisp, and logical recordings with audio that’s easy to hear
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What doesn’t work:
- Videos that start immediately when a page loads
- Long videos (online customers have a short attention span)
- Badly cut videos
- Offensive humor
- High sound levels that blast the minute someone hits Play
- Garbled sound or indistinct voiceovers that can’t be heard
Benefits to Your Site
Assuming you’ve scripted, filmed, and cut a great video, this modern marketing approach can do a lot for your site. Many customers prefer website videos to long blocks of text, while others are more likely to trust a business when they can see and hear the owner or manager speaking on the website. Either way, it’s another medium to engage prospects and customers, and that’s always a good thing.
You may even find that new customers will discover you through your video, rather than your site itself. If you host your video on a channel like YouTube or Vimeo, frequent users of these sites may find you and come to your web page to learn more about your business.
Search engines also love video clips, because they entice users to stay on your page longer. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines measure the amount of time a user spends on a site after a search. Generally speaking, a video will keep users on your website longer – and that alone is enough to boost your search ranking.
As long as it’s well done, there are many benefits to adding short video clips to your website, and you’re likely to notice them right away in the form of customer feedback and new clients who discover you through these alternate channels.