It has been proven time after time that using video not only makes your website more visually appealing and engaging it can help you rank higher in search engines which results in more visitors to your site. 

We have seen a rise in the use of homepage videos. These are usually an animated explainer style video or a promotional introductory piece. If you don’t have a video on your homepage then now is the time to create one and post it to your site. There are different ways of adding videos to your website. You can either upload it to your web server directly and host the video yourself but remember this will affect your bandwidth on your host server. An alternative, and most popular, method of posting videos to your website is to use a third-party service such as YouTube or Vimeo. These services provide HTML embed code for your videos that you can use to embed them on your site. If you use YouTube this can be helpful in increasing your view counts and add to your SEO ranking.

Why use video on your website?

If you consider that you have a very short space of time to make a good impression on the visitor then video can help as over 90% of first impressions are all related to the design aspects of your site. The hope of using video is to retain visitors longer in order to discover more about your company, service or brand.

Did you know that almost 75% of visitors would rather ingest video content to find out more information? 

Websites with video content attract over 40% more web traffic.

The average visitor to your site will spend almost 90% longer on your site if it contains video. This will result in higher conversion rates. 

Another important factor to consider is the benefits video offers to your search rankings. The chances of your site appearing on the first page of search results on Google are greatly increased when you have video content featuring prominently on your site.

What type of video to use

You can put videos anywhere you want on your website, but it is a good idea to be selective and only use the best ones. Quality is very important as you want to add to the user experience by using your best material. Some ideas for types of video content to include are;

Animated explainer video

Product page videos

Service videos

Staff/recruitment videos

Company culture videos

Customer testimonial videos

Sales videos

Quality control

It is important to consider the quality of your video content. Make sure that the duration of your videos are not too long, viewers will become disengaged and turn off. 

By now your website should be responsive. If not, it is the time to convert your content over to a responsive platform. This means your site will be viewed easily no matter what device the viewer is using whether it is desktop or mobile. 

Consider all audiences and make your content fully accessible with the use of captions, transcripts and written descriptions. These will all help usability and increase your search ranking. 

Make sure the load times of all your videos are optimized, nobody wants to sit waiting for a video to load. YouTube is excellent at utilizing adaptive internet speeds to make sure the video plays without interruption.

Testing your content in advance is always a good idea as this will ensure you are only posting content that will meet all the recommendations. There is nothing more important than the overall performance of your website. Full optimization and stability that provide the best possible load speeds is crucial.

If you would like to discuss creating optimized video content to include on your website feel free to contact Andy Holt on 780-907-1445 to arrange a no obligation consultation.