With the continued growth of broadband in this country, websites can afford to be a little more ambitious in the way they attract and convert customers. While some advanced aspects of web design are still to be avoided (Flash and JavaScript which can not, as yet, be read by the search engines), videos are becoming a huge part of online culture. A testament to this is YouTube’s $1.6 billion acquisition by Google around a year into the site’s life, and the fact that YouTube attracts more visitors every day than both eBay and Myspace demonstrates the openness consumers have to the medium. Videos are a big part of people’s everyday online lives and marketers are just beginning to identify their massive potential.
At LeadGenerators, we have dipped our toes into this brave new world of marketing a little already – not in a viral sense, but by actually embedding videos into web pages. We are in the process of adding a short video sales pitch to one of our client’s website, and fully expect it to improve both their site conversion and search engine rankings.
The reasons for the former are obvious: a salesman promoting the package allows customers to feel more at ease with the product, the salesman in the film knows his area and how to sell it and the whole process feels more human and less mechanical. Just as adverts on television can prompt longing for products, videos on websites can do the same – only they have the advantage of being matched to an area the customer is definitely interested in. After all, the potential customer is already looking at a page full of holiday packages, so half the work of a traditional advert is already done.
The effect on search engines is a little less to do with offline advertising and more techie, but bear with me. Basically, Google considers a web page’s ‘stickiness’ when ranking them on its search results. ‘Stickiness’ analyses how long web users stay on a page after finding the link through its search pages – the longer a person stays on the website, the better the page’s search engine ranking in future. What better way to ensure a customer stays on a website than to play them an entertaining, engrossing short video? Done adequately, they will stay on your site at least until the end of the video, and done well they will become more attached to your ‘human’ company and explore the rest of your site, boosting your rankings further.
Better site conversion and improved search engine rankings? To us it seems like too good an opportunity to pass up on.
Travel, Cat Litter and Infidelity
Video: Good for SEO, Good for Site Conversion
