Why your website needs video

Google is the most popular search engine in the world. YouTube is the second largest. A few years ago, Google purchased YouTube. Have you noticed lately that the top search results seem to always be videos?

If you haven’t thought about using video for content marketing, this is the time to do it. Consumers today are relying on mediums like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and smart phones to find out information about products and services before they buy.  But beware of producing video that’s just a commercial for your business. How many of you are fast forwarding through the commercials on your DVR? Consumers don’t want to see advertisements, they want to see stories or engaging education.

Think you have a story that could be viral on the web, but not quite sure you have it in your budget to do so? Thankfully, there are so many tools today that can allow your internal team to create your own videos. You can take video with a Flip camera or a webcam and edit it with programs that most of you already have on your computer like iMovie for Macs or Windows Movie Maker for PCs. With these programs, you can include images, PowerPoint presentations, transitions and perform your own editing. Other tools you may want to consider are a green screen to to create a blank canvas for your background and a product like ScreenFlow that captures or print screens the contents of your desktop.

These programs allow you to easily post a video on YouTube. Once it’s there, you can embed it anywhere – your website, your email campaign and even your Facebook page. If your video has something people want to share, you have a cost-effective marketing piece that also benefits your search engine ranking. In fact, videos have enabled sites with poor ranking to achieve first-page rankings. Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking. So remember, it’s important to optimize your video with a keyword-rich title, content, and descriptive meta data.

Worried about time constraints for this project? You can always leave the whole project to the pros or contract out pieces of the project, such as search engine optimization or editing.

We’ll see you in the movies.