Odds are, you’ve watched a video on your phone or computer at some point in the last 24 hours. Think back 10 years ago at how difficult it was to download or stream video content. With faster internet speeds and the increased usage of smart phones, online video use has skyrocketed and experts predict this trend will continue. In fact, it’s estimated that by 2014, 77% of online activity will be video streaming.
Today, a company’s website is the front porch to the business. It’s where your customer goes when they want to know more about you. For a lot of businesses, as the website goes, so does the company. So here’s three ways good video production and strategy can immediately help your website.
1. Increase User Engagement
Quality web video can increase user engagement on your site and keep visitors on your site longer. Using Flimp media brochures, Rich Media generates a 400%-700% increase in viewer engagement and response rates using online video compared to static content online such as text and graphics.
Similarly, video content results in users spending more time on your website. Keeping viewers on your site longer leads to more opportunities to convert them to customers. If the viewer liked your video and found it helptul, they are more likely to return to your site in the future as a resource.
2. Increase Sales
Ecommerce sites are increasingly recognizing the benefits of video. The number of online retail sites utilizing video increased from 55% in 2009 to 73% in 2010, and for good reason. Living Direct found that when they added video to their site, not only did the site conversion rate improve, but visitors spent nearly 10% longer on pages where video was present.
For retail sites, video allows customers to engage with products in the most realistic and meaningful way possible. The difficulty of selling products online as opposed to a brick-and-mortar store is that a customer never touches the product before they buy it. This is why retailers were slow to adopt online selling methods in the late 90s and early 2000s. Who would buy a pair of shoes without trying them on first?!
Today we know that a remarkable amount of people are comfortbale making that purchase. The challenge for the retailer is providing enough information for the consumer to feel confident enough to make the purchase online. That’s why Zappos, the largest online shoe retailer in the world, uses video demonstrations for their products. They use real employees to describe and show the shoes in use. When they began doing this in 2009, the products with videos saw a sales increase between 6 to 30%.
3. Improve search engine rank
Though increasing user engagement and increasing sales will help your overall SEO and search engine rank, the mere presence of video can help the overall performance of your site. Adding backlinks to a company’s YouTube channel will help grow referring links to your site, which Google reads as valuable.
Also, since Google first started blending search results in 2009 (showing images and videos on a results page), a video is more likely to show up in search results than a traditional text-only page — especially if the title of the video is a long tail keyword!
