How to sell with videos

This article will be of great interest to those who have a product that sells on the Internet, have a video about the product and the desire to increase sales through this video.

Why videos are useful:

1. Work with existing visitors to your page

A video placed on a product page grabs attention, informs about the product, sells the idea of the product, motivates to try the product, and ultimately increases conversion. Video also raises the average length of stay on the page.

2. Attracting new users to your page from search engines

The main task of the video in this case is to be correctly indexed by search engines and get to the top of the search results page. The thumbnail of the video is clearly visible among other search results, so even if the video is at the very bottom of the page, it grabs the attention of users well.

With relatively little competition between videos, it can sometimes be easy to climb to the first page of search results for quality keywords.

Location (hosting)

First, choose a place to “storage” your video: on your server or on third-party video hosting services (Youtube, Vimeo, etc.). We believe that there are no advantages to publishing videos on your server: Youtube offers not only a wide return channel and no brakes, but also various social “bonuses”, for example, likes, comments, the ability to easily share videos, channel subscriptions, etc. .

It is best if the user immediately sees the video on your page. Make a big, high-visibility splashscreen with a “Play” icon, don’t force the visitor to strain to find your video.

The best algorithm for user behavior on your site is as follows: I saw the logo and product name → read the product description (a few words) → I saw the video, I was glad that I didn’t have to waste time and effort reading the text and clicked on “Play”.

Important: the call to action buttons (“buy”, “download”, “register”) should be located immediately next to the video and be its logical continuation. The user must understand for himself that after watching the video, it is customary to click on “register” without options.

And this approach is also effective: demonstrate a CTA button at the end of the video, show an accented mouse click on this button, make exactly the same button next to the video, and the viewer will intuitively want to repeat the action they just saw.

Video sitemap

A video sitemap is an xml file on your server that sends information about the video content of your site to the search engine. It’s strange, but 8 out of 10 of our customers who order a video don’t know what a video sitemap is, and therefore don’t use it for promotion.

If the video is published on your server, then the video sitemap is the only way to let the search engine know about your video, without it the video will not get into the search results. In addition to technical information about the video file, the video sitemap contains the title of the video, its description, and tags. Be sure to write in these fields the relevant keywords for which you want to be in the search results.

Youtube video promotion

The position of your video in YouTube search results depends on factors:

• keywords in the title, description and tags of the video;
• average duration of video viewing;
• the number of views and comments on the video and the channel as a whole;
• the number of subscribers to the channel;
• video age, channel age;
• the number of “likes”, comments, additions to playlists, complaints, video inserts on other sites;
• the number of external links on the video.

This is not a complete list, but it is from these indicators that you should start optimizing and evaluating the result.

Keywords

Specify keywords in the title, description (at least twice), and video tags. There are keywords that are used only with videos and cannot be found using conventional keyword selection tools. Therefore, when choosing keywords, it is necessary to use not only the usual Google Keyword Tool and Yandex Wordstat, but also double-check all the results using the Youtube Keyword Tool.

Recommendation: Post a link to your site in the first 150 characters of the video description. According to statistics, 6% of users go through it.

Video viewing time

A short average view time and a high bounce rate (cases where users close the page almost immediately) is a very serious “problem” in the eyes of Google. This is an indication that the video is either useless, or uninteresting, or irrelevant to the keywords. The probability of getting on the first pages of search results for such videos is low.

Write only relevant keywords, and try your best to keep the viewer on the page as much as possible. For example, try to organize a discussion in the comments.

Also, try not to make long videos. The ideal video length is 90-120 seconds for a detailed sales video and 30-45 seconds for a short how-to video. Such videos do not have time to annoy the viewer, the videos are watched to the end, they do not leave the pages ahead of time, Google is satisfied, the video rating is growing.

Video promotion

For a high rating, a video should have a lot of views, comments, subscribers, etc.

Organize video distribution across all your channels:

• email newsletter (you can’t embed a video in a letter, but you can insert an image that imitates the Youtube player window with a large “play” button);
• press release (if you are convinced that the topic will be of interest to editors);
• publications with videos on blogs, forums;
• social networks and Twitter;
• video response to a popular video on your topic.

An alternative to conventional promotion is services to boost the number of views and subscribers. We recommend that you use them only in rare cases and be very careful: it is important for Google that all promotion (including videos) be natural, so you can be banned for too aggressively boosting views.

These tips do not guarantee 100% success, but you can start with them, and then analyze the result and draw conclusions.