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May 30th, 2010 by Nick
Your website is the window to your company as a whole and in an ultra-competitive business world it needs to stand out from the rest. Any search engine optimisation company will tell you that quality and variety of content is the key to making your website work to its full potential, and with web design advancing at an alarming rate, organisations need to put a bit more time and effort into creating and maintaining their websites.
As informative and effective as concise text and information is within web pages, it does not do a great deal for giving you a USP and an edge over your competitors. Gone are the days when a few words were enough. Consumer demand is high and users want images, graphics and instructional videos, such as podcasts from the websites they are visiting.
Videos in particular are now one of the most popular items to include within a website. The benefits of using videos as content are endless. For starters, they are more attention grabbing and enticing to users and extremely easy to digest. Videos also enable you to include a lot more information, as you are not restricted as much by space and the combination of visual and audio provides more scope for larger content and more information.
Including videos on your websites is not a new concept but is becoming more of an expectation as opposed to additional bonus content. Once you have decided that videos are going to form part of your website content then there are a few pointers to get you started and ensure that you get the best out of this content from and SEO point of view.
It is important to remember that no matter what format the content on your website is, it is still just that – content. The approach used to deciding what the purpose of your video is going to be and the way it is created should be the same as when you are producing any content. Consider what information would be best communicated by video and start with just a couple. As with all content, consider what consumers would want to watch as opposed to just what you think it should include.
Most companies choose to use a third party site to host their videos, such as podcasts. This is a good idea because their sites are usually designed with video content in mind so will be more equipped and offer quicker page loading. The danger with this however, is that it is not increasing traffic to your website as people are in fact viewing the video through the host site and not your own.
There are ways to combat this. Include a link back to your website or offer an alternative or follow up video on your website. You could even include a question within your video and the answer is found on your website. To ensure your video is ranked high in searches, make sure the titles are clear and concise and any tags are applicable to the content.
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Great article. Some other benefits I usually add:
- In the case of e-commerce sites, using instructional / informative videos can help with conversion rates
- Offline, having videos explaining concepts on your website can be a great tool to use in sales presentations or to refer to on customer service calls
- Direct SEO traction from podcasts: If you use the right hosting service your podcast video gets submitted to hundreds of directories. Tagged correctly this can increase your online exposure immensely.
Still, it seems that here in the UK video can be a hard sell to some companies, who want to measure direct monetary ROI, but as you know the returns are not necessarily immediate, and not always tangible in monetary terms.
I’ll be using your article when trying to convince people though – thanks!