How Video Can Increase Your Blog Traffic by Tom More. Available from <http://www.business.com/media-and-communication/tom-more-increase-your-blog-traffic/> [December 23, 2016]
While an image in the past used to have quite the impact on target audiences (remember Facebook’s old news feed?), nowadays marketers are well aware of the fact that a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. In fact, a video is more powerful than the written word or the photograph that an executive from Facebook has actually predicted the social platform will probably be “all video” in five years.
This dramatic shift means great things for businesses, big and small. It means the more videos businesses post, the more clicks, and traffic they will receive. YouTube viewers, for instance, watch more than 3 billion hours of videos a month, and more than 400 hours of videos are uploaded to the site every minute.
Businesses are realizing they need to invest their time and money in creating videos that will increase their blog traffic and revenue. Here are a few tips you should follow in order to guarantee your company is doing it right, and in order to make sure you aren’t behind in this technological race.
It’s all in the numbers
Businesses want to increase not only the amount of traffic to their pages but also the number of visits their blog posts receive. One of the ways to get noticed by Google and other search engines is by adding a video to your blog and watching as the number of organic traffic to your site increases by 157 percent. In fact, pages with videos on them are 53 times more likely to end up on page one of Google’s search results.
While showing up on a search result is critical, it’s not as important as people actually clicking to enter your site. However, videos do just that. Having a clip on your blog can generate three times as many monthly visitors to your page, and a video on your homepage can increase conversion rates by 20 percent.
Attention-grabbing is key
Once your targeted audience members have clicked on your link and entered your site, you have to convince them to stay on it. A video comes into play here as well. Website visitors spend 88 percent more time on a blog or site that has videos than those that do not. This means they are more likely to explore the site and click on its other pages. Since an average reader has a 15-second attention span, videos are more likely to catch a viewer’s attention for a longer period of time and get him or her to stay longer on a certain page.
Word of mouth still works
As we’ve mentioned before, appearing on search engines can help people discover your business’ page. However, the old-school way of word of mouth still works. If you see something really interesting on the web, will you share it with your friends? You might be surprised to know this, but 92 percent of consumers who watch videos on their mobile devices will share those videos with others. Add that to the fact that videos that are around 15 seconds long will be shared 37 percent more than longer videos that span between 30 seconds to a minute.
Create a personal connection with your audience
A video is able to create a personal experience for consumers since a personalized element snaps us out of endless scanning. We are able to recognize that a specific piece of content is for us and relevant to our needs. Marketers who use this information to their advantage and personalize their web experiences actually see on average a 19 percent lift in sales.
By posting a video on your blog, you are able to create a personal experience and relationship with your audience who will trust the information you are giving them.
Video keeps growing
Nearly 150 million Americans watch videos online. That accounts for almost half of the United States’ total population. Add that to the fact that a third of all online activity is watching videos, and an average internet user spends nearly 90 percent more time on sites with videos, and you’ll realize just how powerful video is. These numbers are expected to grow, with online video consumption by consumers expected to account for 76% of internet traffic by the year 2018.
To sum up, a video is by no means a new way of sharing information and gaining attention, but it is still expanding and becoming more popular. Videos are all around us, and as technology advances, we encounter more ways of sharing via moving images, such as the new “live” features on Facebook, and Periscope that preceded it. People like receiving their information as quickly as possible, and enjoy the personalized feeling they get from watching to which they videos they can relate. This is precisely why videos are proving to be an important step in generating traffic to our sites, and why every business owes it to themselves to use it on their blog’s site.
How Video Can Increase Your Blog Traffic by Tom More. Available from <http://www.business.com/media-and-communication/tom-more-increase-your-blog-traffic/> [December 23, 2016]