We’ll freely admit that this isn’t breaking news — it’s been the case for a couple of years now — but adding video to your site is extremely important for improving your SEO, your effectiveness with customers and online conversions.

Why are we bringing it up now? Well, two reasons:

1) While video has been important for a while, it becomes more so all the time. Video has the great “one-two punch” of being incredibly effective both for the human visitor and for search engine crawlers.

2) People have come to expect video on top-quality websites. Want to differentiate yourself from your competitors? Add video throughout your website and leave them in the dust.

Video helps establish your credibility regarding your field with the viewer. As it relates specifically to product videos, a recent study indicated that visitors who view product videos are 85 percent more likely to buy than visitors who do not. Another study indicated that video on your Facebook timeline increases engagement by 33 percent.

With all the changes to Google’s algorithms, they still love video. That ensures greater search rankings, bringing visitors to your site. Once they get there, that very same video also engages your potential consumer, leading to higher conversion and click-through rates.

One important thing to consider is that you don’t want all (or even most) of your video to necessarily be advertising. While product demonstrations and examples can be useful for showcasing your products, it’s also useful to have video that is simply related to your industry or service.

The pieces Internet viewers like to watch are informative and entertaining. Outside of video that specifically showcases products, any advertising is preferably subtle and subordinate to the content.  To harvest the full potential of videos, they should be deployed across the website. If you have a variety of different product types, including a video for each is a huge benefit.  The videos can match keywords specific to each product, which targets consumers who are searching for products by using those keywords. It is also important to keep the video catalog up to date, ensuring that new products will be displayed as video results in searches.

Videos won’t do you any good if search engines can’t find them, so it’s critical to implement video markup, video sitemaps and syndication. This ensures that videos are indexed by Google and other engines, squeezing every last bit of SEO goodness out of your video investment.

You can implement in-page video markup by using proper context for the video, including a descriptive title, proper keywords, links to related material, search-friendly video URLs and text transcripts. An Internet marketing professional at Ring Ring Marketing will be happy to explain the process of making video work for you throughout your website.  We have partners who can come to your business to shoot professional videos.