Five reasons why the small business owner should include video on it's website

Author: David Franzina

Technologically speaking, the web has evolved more than ten fold since the last recession. With smart phones    and iPads   flooding the market, adding video to your website should be a no-brainer. It takes just a few days to complete a professionally produced, quality video and with today's ubiquitous video professionals at your fingertips your company can add high quality video to it's website adding credibility and value to it"s bottom line. Here are five reasons why it's important to incorporate video into your website.

1. Video moves. I know it sounds trite, but the reason you have a website in the first place is to educate and inform potential customers about the products and services you offer. Second to that, is to provide a convenient way for customers to contact your sales department. The easiest way to do both is with a video. On my website, in addition to those two, I try to provide enough information for my customer to make a good buying decision. Videos can help you do that too. The main problem I see with the static, text only website is that today, most people get bored too quickly. A video can help draw their attention and makes them stay on your site longer. Basically, your customers crave entertainment and with a fun, informative video you can entertain them indefinitely. Combining a great story, moving images, photography and motion graphics offers visitors a chance to feel and see what your business is all about. And in some small way, video emphasizes the qualities that set you apart from your competition... In fact, studies have shown that most people would rather watch a short three minute video clip than read an entire paragraph of text.

2. Video improves credibility. When done right, video will increase your credibility with your customers. Customers want to be assured that their decision to buy from you was a good one. A "how-to" video describing how to properly use your products and services is much more entertaining than the same info written out for you to read. If the idea of creating a demo video doesn't make since for your business, you can present a mini-seminar a topic that will promote your business. Just like in face to face selling you want to keep the hard sell to a minimum. You want to establish yourself and the expert who stands behind the company with exceptional service. As you instill in your customer the confidence to buy, sales and traffic will increase dramatically.

3. Video swill set you apart from your competitors. If your company supports a terrific cause, talk about it in a video and post it to your site. You've watched the video on your competition site. Stop talking about it and hire someone to make you a video. Incorporating creative and entertaining video on your own website helps set you apart and instills confidence in your clients. Your customers will see the difference and can use that difference to make a buying decision. Creating a unique and helpful video is a way to tell your story and will increase your visibility and increase your credibility with others

4. Video will improve your Google Ranking. Search engines rely on many factors to come up with your website ranking. Video adds many search engine points to your score in their ranking. Pictures and video add a new dimension to your web pages, and search engine rankings factor this in. In fact, Google announced recently that it will be applying indexing videos too. Labeling your video with meaningful tags serves to improve your rankings. Improving your Google rankings will increase traffic to your site and ultimately increase sales.

5. Video can link your site to others. The craziness and popularity of YouTube video points out an important fact about the moving image. If you post it in an easy-to-share, interesting format, others will link to it. Setting up a YouTube account for your business is very simple. And YouTube provides simple, user friendly tools so you can add links directly from your video back to your site. If your video happens to "go viral" it will drive visitors to your site thus generating a huge selling opportunity. Video will draw people in, keep them on your site and increase the amount of money your business ultimately makes.