Are you looking for easy ways to get better search results and improve your user experience? Try using videos throughout your website as an easy and free technique to make your website more valuable to your guests. It is clear that user engagement is a key factor in the success of your website. During a revamp of the Glenwood Springs Tourism website I uncovered some startling results from adding videos to some of their webpages. Based upon a sampling of pages before and after adding video, the time on the webpage increased 182% on average and the webpages garnered 43% more organic search traffic.
Here are the details:
- We rewrote content that was “duplicate” because it also was shared with some other websites
- We added videos to the webpages.
Hanging Lake Page (we added two videos from Youtube)
- Average time on website went from 2:00 minutes to 4:23 minutes (a 119.11% increase)
- Traffic from Organic Search increased 50.35%
Glenwood Hot Springs Pool Page (We added one video from Youtube)
- Average time on the page went from 1:02 minutes to 3:50 minutes (a 267.83% increase)
- Traffic from organic search increased 50.83%
Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park Page (We added 3 videos from Youtube)
- Average time went from 1:36 minutes to 4:09 minutes (a 159% increase)
- Traffic from organic search increased 34.3%
On average, 14.76% of visitors clicked and watched the videos on those respective pages.
Certainly the fact that we rewrote the content helped improve the search results and time on the site. But, it is obvious that adding the videos played a large role in the improved engagement statistics.
While the results are stunning and impressive, the exciting element was discovering that it is easy to add videos to a website. All we did was go to Youtube and search out videos that were appropriate for the page and then we embedded them into the page. When you are looking at a video, click on “share” and then click on “embed.” It is perfectly legal to do this… if the the videographer didn’t want you to embed it, they would have turned off that feature when they uploaded it to Youtube
Do you need more third party data to convince you to start adding videos throughout your website? Here are some video stats culled from MagnetVideo’s 101 Online Video Statistics for 2012.
A comScore press release states that high impact video (professionally produced or user genreated) increases conversion rates:
Wooshii reports that video increases time on site and conversion rates across a wide range of e-commerce websites
In a marketing sherpa article: regularly posting videos helped the company’s website receive 200% to 300% more monthly unique visitors and a 100% longer average time-on-site spent per visitor. The average time spent on pages with videos was 3 minutes compared to 1 minute and 30 seconds averaged on pages without videos.
SEOMOZ concludes that posts with videos included will attract 3 times more in-linking domains than a plain old text post.
As posted in a KISSmetrics blog, viewers of a product video are 64-85% more likely to buy after watching and video now appears in 70% of the top 100 search results.
GIGAmon shows Videos are 53 times more likely than text pages to show up on the first page of search results. Also 60% of C-level and senior executives said they would watch a video before reading text on the same web page.
According to several case studies, videos on landing pages have increased conversion rates by 32%, 86%, and 130.5%, says the MarketingTech blog.
A multivariate test shows conversion rates lifted by 100% with video on landing pages in lightbox modal popup. The average conversion rate was 6.5% without video, 11% with video embedded in the page, and 13% with video in lightbox modal popup.
