Why should you introduce your company with a video on your website?
This blog has come straight off the back of us receiving three enquiries in a week about intro videos, so we thought we’d explain why we think they’re so popular and why everyone should have one. Firstly, I should probably explain what we mean by intro videos.
Intro videos are a snapshot of your company presented loud and clear on your homepage. They are designed to convey everything that’s important about your company at a speed text and pictures can’t hope to match.
So I guess the question is, why get one? You have a website, it’s got loads of pictures on it, it’s been optimised pretty well for search engines and it’s shiny and sexy. Why change?
The answer is a combination of increasing impact and keeping up with progress.
It’s undeniable that the most potent type of communication on the net is video. Of course I would say that – I’m a video producer – but I’m also beginning to realise that you probably know it too. At DRP, we find ourselves banging on about the merits of video less and less these days, because more and more, people already know how great it is.
Its power is in its intensity. In a few square inches of screen space and 60 seconds, you can feature a message from your CEO, testimonials from your clients, an intro to the team, graphics, music, and anything else you feel is important in telling the world who you are. In that short space of time, you can really connect with your potential customers, and website visitors are crying out for this kind of dynamic, high-impact content.
The above graph demonstrates the very real impact of video. The values used in this graph were all genuinely invented by us
What’s more, it’s not just the users that are watching; crucially, it’s the search engines too.
Google bought Youtube in 2006 for more money than they’d ever spent before, because they realised just how many people were watching videos. At the time, Youtube was the 10th most viewed site on the web [1]. Since then, Google has adapted its search bots accordingly and Youtube is now the 3rd most visited site on the internet (behind Google and Facebook) [2]. SEO expert Bruce Clay has been quoted as saying “Google has actually started to build it (video) into the algorithm… A year from now, we are going to be sitting here saying – ‘if you don’t have video… you are just not going to rank.” [3]
So pure and simple, having a video at all massively improves your visibility to search engines. So that’s a pretty big reason to get some kind of video on your site. However given the visibility your video will have, it’s also crucial to really think through what it says about you.
Intro video on The Glazing Face website
You should be mindful that the average video is abandoned by 20% of viewers in the first 10 seconds [4] so to retain as many viewers as possible, make sure the beginning of your intro is interesting. There are many ways of doing this but the most important is to get to the point. Lush graphical intros are often lovely, but don’t linger on them, their charm fades in seconds.
You should also remember to keep it short. If it’s too long, your visitors won’t hang around. and if they stop your video, there’s a massive chance that they’ll leave your site altogether so think really carefully about why you need more than 60 seconds to introduce yourselves.
It’s often much better to have several videos strategically placed around your website in areas of specific relevance, than one lumbering hulk of an intro video on your homepage trying to be all things to all people. It rarely costs more to have four, one-minute videos than it does to have one, four-minute production so compartmentalise your message, it’s much more effective.
Despite most of us knowing that video is ‘good’ not everyone knows how to use it, so get some advice. Ask someone who knows (like us) to talk you through the different styles you could employ to make your video dynamic, informative and eye-catching to people and search engines and you’ll soon find that getting a video produced is a fun and rewarding experience that will really drive you up the rankings and give your sales a boost.
Chris
chris@deadready.co.uk
[1] Search Engine Journal 2006. 5 Reasons Why Google Will Buy Youtube. Available at <http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-reasons-why-google-will-buy-youtube/3876/> [accessed 23rd August 2011]
[2] Alexa.com 2011. Top Sites. Available at http://www.alexa.com/ [accessed 23rd Aug 2011]
[3] reelseo.com 2010. Bruce Clay interview. Available at <http://www.reelseo.com/engagement-objects-seo/> [accessed 23rd Aug 2011]
[4] Visible measures 2010. Understanding Viewer Abandonment Trends in Short-Form Online Video Content. Available at http://corp.visiblemeasures.com/contact-us/abandonment-research [accessed 23rd August 2011]