How to use video to increase website visitor traffic

Web video is increasingly being adopted by savvy companies that are ready to invest a part of their marketing budget in increasing measurable online visibility and visitor engagement: In other words, the cat’s out the bag: video gets you noticed!  One of our strategic partners Webmarketing123 recently asked us to produce a handful of videos for their site as a part of their online marketing strategy. Let me first say that it has, in under a month, measurably helped them – we’ll get to the how in a minute. For a quick reference, here’s the overview video they’ve placed on their website homepage:
As experts in search engine optimization, Webmarketing123 knew that video was going to be an important next step for growing their own online visibility. Video has long been valued as a brand messaging and engagement tool, but increasingly – and additionally – as an SEO tool. Measuring the ROI of online video has been challenging but the analytic tools and techniques are starting to catch up to the needs of marketers. If nothing else, the more prospective targeted customers that you can engage and for longer duration, the better!
So what exactly can video do for your company website… and bottom line?
Since launching the videos on their site earlier this month (Feb 2012), Webmarketing 123 has already seen a 13% lift in overall lift in traffic and 44% increase in time on site. Wow.
For non-branded search terms, which for them might be “Bay Area SEO” or “SEO marketing companies”, they saw a 13% traffic increase and a 54% increase in time on site…and just to be clear, these are good numbers.
This data means that by adding video to their site, it has become more ‘findable’ for prospective customers. A big part of that is that the Google search engine favors pages with video content, pushing it higher in the search results.
In addition, people love them some video, it’s engaging, it’s immersive, and that is almost certainly why they saw a huge boost in time visitors spent on their site: people watch the video, get to know them, hear their story and get more familiar with the Webmarketing’s offerings. It helps take away the element of the unknown and is one step closer to closing.
It’s worth noting we will be rolling out some custom enhanced video SEO optimization techniques and expect and even bigger overall boost once implimented, more on that later.
In the mean time, there are a few added bonuses to having their video content:

• They now have a nice handful of content for their You Tube company channel, which is the #2 largest search engine!( after Google) If you don’t have any video on You Tube, you are invisible to those eyeballs.
• Prospects can educate themselves, in their own time, not by speaking with Webmarketing’s sales staff for initial overview info from prospects that are very early in the sales cycle.
• They now have content to make their social media interactions more engaging.
• They are taking a big step ahead of their competition, many of whom are not doing video yet. (You wouldn’t want to have been the last company on the block to have a website would you?!)
• They have a bunch of humanized but consistent content to represent their company that is available for anyone 24/7, worldwide. Face to face is great, but video is the next best thing.

I’m planning on sharing more once we roll out the video optimization and tracking features and we’re hoping to measure and demonstrate what the real impact is on their bottom line.