Just five or six years ago, many website owners treated video as a frilly add-on. Sort of like elaborate flash animations–cool looking possibly, but not essential.

Website owners shouldn’t make that mistake today.  Video is essential for increasing sites’ online visibility and converting visitors once they arrive at the site.

One of the main driving forces behind the necessity of video is Google.  Google owns YouTube (the second largest search engine, well ahead of Bing) and Google believes video is an integral part of the future of search.  Google includes video in blended search results and is always looking at ways to further integrate video.

Getting your video to be found by Google requires optimization.  Google crawlers can’t natively read video, so you need to provide the relevant data.  All videos should be uploaded to YouTube, and you should absolutely take advantage of the opportunities to fill in your title and description with relevant information that includes targeted keywords.  Invite your fans and friends to 1) like your video 2)watch it all the way through and 3)comment on it. Respond to these comments, create activity and community and Google/YouTube’s algorithm will take notice. Especially in longtail, local niches.  Video, even though it is growing rapidly, is still a differentiator.  More sites don’t have it now than do.  Optimize and promote your video and you’ll end up, in all likelihood, occupying a nice piece of real estate on a SERP.

All of the available data suggests video is terrific for conversion.  It grabs people emotionally–more so than static pictures and text.  And the explosion of animated explainer videos to deliver value propositions over the last couple of years is driven wholly by the very strong conversion numbers achieved when these videos are done well.  Attention spans are held longer.  Video is also just a lot easier to grasp on a small screen than pinching out text.

Three quick pieces of advice for DIY video: shoot tight (close up) because your screen is already small.  Leave your CTA on the final frame–don’t fade to black.  And use b-roll/non-interview footage.  Don’t rely exclusively on talking heads.

One final note: one of the myths out there is that serious business decisions, especially in B2B, aren’t informed by online video.  It just ain’t true.  We put together an online video (below) to highlight some of the data about how big online video is in general and how effective it is reaching decision makers. Hope you enjoy it!