Should I Put Video On My Homepage?

Video Home Pages: Beneficial For Engagement?

As more and more companies choose to put videos on their home pages, it makes sense that you are starting to consider one yourself! Videos on professional home pages seem like an engaging way to quickly convey the point of your company and to keep those top-of-funnel prospects on your site long enough to get a good first impression of your brand. While there are many ways to make a video part of your home page in a successful way, it is also wise to know the pitfalls of adding video that doesn’t work for your potential customers.

Pros and Cons of Video on Your Website

One of the main benefits of having a video on your home page is rapid brand understanding. This means that a high-quality video conveys the personality, goals, and offerings of your company all in just a few seconds. These videos often feature the actual individuals that your customers might be working with, increasing a feeling of personal connection. These videos are short, so the viewer has no time to get bored, and they are accompanied by valuable text that makes it possible to choose not to view the video and still engage immediately with your brand.

The cons of video content are all related to not picking the right video for the job or implementing it incorrectly. You are likely to lose engagement from your prospects who visit your home page if:

• Your video is long – even 2 minutes or a little more can be too long!
• Your video is overly detailed – your customers want a general overview, not the nitty-gritty. Save that info for the explainer videos deeper in your site.
• Your video auto plays – ever been in a quiet room with other workers and have a blaring autoplay video open up on your screen? You scramble to close it, no matter how much you may want to know about the company. Autoplay takes away choice and is almost always a bad idea.
• Your video has poor production value – creating a video for the sake of creating a video is one of those efforts where people can immediately tell that you didn’t invest much in the process. Stick with text if you aren’t willing to make your video look professional grade.

Qualities of Great Video Content

On the other hand, once you commit to great video content, you’ll find that you can get a ton of traffic specifically because of your engaging videos! Here are some tips for making home page videos the best they possibly can be:

• Within a few seconds, make it clear what your company is selling: This isn’t weird! Your customers are there looking for your brand’s value-added.
• Showcase the tone and atmosphere you want to convey: music, lighting, smiling faces, and other cues in video can really pull on a person’s emotions better than text alone can.
• Keep it short, sweet, and general: your customers just want to get to know you; they can click through your site to get all the details.

Video and SEO: Understanding the Connection

While video doesn’t directly impact the SEO of your site, since search engines don’t know what the video is about, your video has an indirect impact because of the bounce rate, or rate at which people go to your site and immediately navigate away. A great video will keep visitors on your site for a minute or so, during which time they’ll often choose to engage further through links on your home page. A frustrating, autoplaying, or low-quality video may cause people to immediately disengage and return to the search engine page; this counts as a bounce, so your page’s rank may suffer from it.

If you don’t have video in your repertoire at this point, SocialSEO just added video services for making sure that your video is the one that is drawing people in. Call to get a quote today!