“Show me, don’t tell me.” It’s a popular mantra for successful businessmen – and it’s easy to see why. When you’re working your way toward industry domination, time is money. It makes no sense to spend 20 minutes reading what an individual could tell or show you in five. So give the people what they want – video. Not only will this satisfy the web content cravings of your audiences, it also helps generate organic search engine optimization (SEO) for your site, putting it front, center and ahead of the competition on web browsers.
easy, convenient and surprisingly good for your site’s SEO
There are benefits to incorporating video into your website that work from purely a convenience-based perspective:
- Video caters to the short attention span cultivated by the modern web surfer more than paragraphs upon paragraphs of text content.
- When used correctly, video immediately establishes the voice or personality of your organization, allowing viewers to immediately connect to your content and cause.
- Certain kinds of content, such as the popular “How To” style articles, are more readily suited to video’s show and tell format.
However, integrating video into your site also offers you real, technical advantages.
Search engines like Bing or Google primarily perform blended searches. This means that when you enter a term into the search box and click “Go” your engine of choice crawls the web looking for, not just text, but also video, images, news stories and maps. Since there are already far more words online than there are video, sites that include this more rare element often end up at the tops of search result pages. In fact, a study conducted by Forrester.com revealed, websites that include video have a 50% better chance at turning up on the first page of search results than websites relying upon text alone. Even at that, hiring a professional web marketer to optimize your business’ video could increase your organic search results even further.
make the switch and do it right
The time to switch to video is now. Even if you aren’t ready to incorporate video into each page of your website, start adding this medium little by little, where the content proves appropriate. Adding video to your website now will help you grow your organization or business’ reputation for interactive excellence immediately and secure your place ahead of the competition, both on the search engines and in the minds of your customers.
However, take care: only add video that contributes valuable information to the content of your webpage; otherwise all of your efforts may end up driving customers away instead of enticing them toward you. Make sure that all video elements you choose to incorporate look clean, well lit and properly edited. Most importantly, ensure that your new video content adds to, builds or enhances overall your brand’s identity.