27 Nov Top 3 Reasons You Need Video on Your Website
VIDEO INCREASES ENGAGEMENT
Engage Customers with Video Content
Users love video. Why? Depends who you ask. It’s convenient, it’s concise, it’s visual, it moves. Whatever their reasoning, users find video content more engaging than static text and images. We even have some stats to back that up:
• More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day (Buffer)
• One-third of online activity is spent watching video. (Wordstream)
• 80 percent of millennials consider video content when researching a purchase decision (Animoto)
• The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video (Forbes)
With that much interest in video content, adding video to your website seems like a no-brainer. The ultimate goal of your website is to sell your product or service, but even before a user reaches that point your site serves a very important role in moving people toward that goal (down the sales funnel). Users must be engaged at every stage of the buying process if you want to keep them moving down the funnel.
You’ve got to explain the need for your service, tell people about your company, convey all the benefits your product/service offers, and so much more. Why not do it through a medium your users already love? Use an explainer video to demonstrate the need for your product/service. Create an emotional anthem video to showcase your company. Film an interview with a happy customer to show users how your product/service has helped others. There is endless opportunity for engaging, purposeful video content throughout your website and blog.
VIDEO ESTABLISHES TRUST
Give Your Brand a Personality with Video
Website copy can certainly get your point across, but there’s something about seeing a face – or a place – and hearing a voice that offers a level of comfort that you just can’t get from text or still images. Including video content on your website adds a personal touch to the user experience.
Whether you choose to capture a message from the CEO, an interview with an expert on staff or a behind-the-scenes look at your day-to-day operations, video allows prospective clients or customers to put a face with the (brand) name. Why is that important? Because a brand doesn’t have a brain. The brand doesn’t decide to honor a money-back guarantee or to help you exchange a product when you accidentally bought the wrong size. It’s the people behind the brand that the customer connects with. If the people who stand for a brand are trustworthy, only then does the brand become trustworthy in the eyes of the consumer.
Connect with Your Customers Emotionally
People don’t make decisions based on logic alone. They decide to spend their money based on a feeling. So you’re not just selling your product/service. You’re selling innovation or luxury or power or efficiency. These are the things your customers really want. And video gives you a powerful platform with which you can convey these abstract concepts and establish an emotional connection to your brand.
VIDEO IMPROVES SEO
Increase Your Google Rank with Video
When users are watching – and enjoying – videos on your website, the average time spent on your site (a.k.a. dwell time) is likely to increase. For example, let’s say the average time a user spends on your about page right now is 10 seconds. If you were to add a 60-second video explaining your company and most of your users watched even half of that video, your average dwell time for that page could triple.
If you’re wondering why you should care about dwell time, you should know that it can have a significant impact on your search engine ranking. When Google sees users spending lots of time on a page, it assumes that page must be meeting the needs of the users who are visiting it. And, with that logic, it must be a pretty important page, so it deserves a higher ranking.
Rank Your Site for Better Keywords
If you know anything about SEO, you know that it can be tough to rank for the keywords you want. A website for a wedding venue may be able to rank highly for “industrial wedding venue in Winston-Salem, NC” but would be fighting an uphill battle if their goal was to appear on the first page of results for a much broader keyword, like “wedding venue.”
This is still the case for video search engines like YouTube (Yes, it’s a search engine. In fact, it’s the world’s 2nd largest search engine right after Google (Search Engine Journal). However, you certainly have a better shot if video is a medium that many companies in your sphere haven’t yet taken advantage of. Do some YouTube searches for questions, tutorials, explainers or interviews you think your target audience might be searching for. If you’re not immediately overwhelmed by videos that give you exactly what you were looking for, you may find there is a gold mind waiting for you there.
WHY YOU NEED VIDEO ON YOUR WEBSITE
To sum up our advice on video, GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT. Users love video content and will be more engaged with your website if video is a key part of it. Creating video content allows you to establish trust and emotional connections among prospective customers. Plus, it helps with SEO. So what are you waiting for?