How To Properly Use Video Content On Your Website (And Why It Matters)
One of the most popular ways to attract new clients these days is by including video in your marketing strategy. The benefits of it are really big and if you still don’t use this tactic, maybe it is time to give it a try.
Of course, if you want to see the benefits of using video content, you need to do it very carefully. Simply putting videos on your website pages may even hurt your traffic and engagement.
So what are the most important aspects you need to be careful abоut:
No autoplay
One of the most irritating things we often see on websites are videos that autoplay. Many marketers use such tactics as they want to make sure that visitors will see the video. But in most cases users just hit ‘stop’.
That is why our suggestion is not to set your videos to autoplay. If you want to include video content on your website pages, there are plenty of other ways to grab your visitors’ attention.
One simple rule that you need to remember is that you want to funnel them into a certain action through call-to-actions and quality content and not by being irritating with autoplaying videos or pop-ups.
Surround your video with quality content
Putting some good content with your video is a good idea for a plenty of reasons. From a SEO perspective it will most certainly boost the time your visitors spend on your site which is a valuable optimization metric. If you also put some good links in the text, you will also reduce the bounce rate. That is the percentage of people who leave your website without going to another page.
If you do not know what content to prepare to surround your video, you can always write a short description of your video. In case your video is an interview, it’s a good idea to write a transcript.
Put only relevant videos
If you’ve decided to put some videos on your website, but haven’t produced unique and quality enough ones, you better not do it all. It’s important that the video content you put on your pages is relevant to your industry and to your website. That means that you should have a very clear idea of what your audience is make your video appealing to your visitors’ preferences.
Put a call-to-action (CTA)
You may notice that the call-to-action appears in many of our article about marketing tips. And there is a simple reason for that – they actually work and can be super effective.
The most popular video platform – YouTube, enables you to put a special call-to-action overlay on your videos. That is a little ad that appears on your video that you can customize so that it fits your needs. You can check out a step-by-step guide on how to set up a call-to-action overlay in this blog post from Internet Marketing Ninjas.
Of course, you create a powerful call-to-action not only on your video, but also as part of the surrounding content. Just be innovative and think of the best way to make your visitors do the action you want them to do.
Do not put the videos at the bottom of your page
If your video is the most important part of your content, do not put it at the bottom of your pages. Users tend not to scroll down too much and if you do so, there is the risk that many visitors will simply skip it.
A way better idea is to put the video in a more visible place on your page and then put the surrounding content below. See how Mashable does it with their videos.
By putting your video at the top your visitors immediately know that this is the most important part a big part of them will probably hit ‘play’.
Do not make the video player too small or too big
When you put a video on your page you can define what size you want the player to be. Of course, the size of your video player mainly depends on your overall website design, but we strongly advise you to make sure that it isn’t either too big or too small.
If you make it too small, people will need to always switch to full screen if they want to view your video. And as many users do not like to watch videos on full screen, they will simply skip it. On the other side, website pages with only one huge video player on them are also not very appealing to visitors. That means that you need to find the perfect balance. Usually, something around 640px is just enough.
Do not put too many videos on a single page
Unless you are creating some kind of a video collection it’s not a very good idea to put more than two videos on a single page. This will only make your visitors lose their focus. If you want them to view your video, make sure that it is the only one on the page and that it is surrounded with good and appealing content.
Why video content matters?
The first big advantage of video content is that really increases the time users spend on your website. Although there are many discussions whether ‘time on site’ is a ranking factor, it certainly is very important. If users spend more time on your website, that means they find your content interesting. And as Google wants to promote only quality content it’s perfectly natural that they use the ‘time on site’ metric as a ranking factor.
Video content can also help you in terms of SEO by increasing the backlinks and social shares of your content. The backlinks are the links from external websites that link to you. The more quality backlinks you acquire, the better your rankings are. The reason is that when Google sees that a lot of quality website link to your content, it assumes that your website is valuable and boost its rankings.
And regarding social shares, quality content always boost social engagement. Again there are plenty of discussions whether socials signals are part of Google’s search algorithms or not, but there is no doubt that they are a sign of quality and interesting content.
To sum it, the advantages of implementing video on your website pages are huge. By using video marketing carefully and with proper planning and preparation you can not only make your website more interesting for your visitors, but also boost your SEO and reach more potential customers.
Tip for Oxxy users:
If you are an Oxxy user, you can easily embed videos from the two most popular video content platforms on the internet – YouTube and Vimeo. You just need to add the video element from the elements menu and add a valid YouTube or Vimeo URL.
Now head to Oxxy and give it a try!
