Videos are quickly becoming the cherry on top of a perfectly designed, mobile-friendly, responsive, easy-to-navigate, and beautiful business website. In years past, it was good enough to simply have a URL with your basic business information—address, hours of operation, a contact email, and maybe some testimonials.
But as video continues to take over everyday web browsing—by 2019, an incredible 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic will be video traffic—all kinds of websites are recognizing how important this visual medium is in keeping visitors engaged, amused, and coming back for more.
No matter how bare bones, run-of-the-mill, esoteric, or any other word you want to throw in front of your business that implies you don’t need a video to help with marketing your brand, you’re wrong. There are a ton of reasons why your website could use videos—let’s just highlight the top five to give you an idea of how useful they can be, no matter what your goal.
Impart lots of information quickly and easily
Your video doesn’t need to be a full-length feature. In fact, the right amount of time for a video is in the 60-90 second range (bonus points if it’s under a minute, so it can easily be shared to Instagram).
Create a quick, live-action or animated video that you can show first-time visitors to give them a sense of what your company is, does, and hopes to do. If you think your homepage text already does this, note that viewers retain way more of a message while watching a video than they do when reading it in text.
Make sure that any text or copy in the video is clear, concise, and clean. No long, awkward, personal email addresses or rambling introductions. Focus on making the video as visually appealing as possible.
Show off your expertise
An educational video that shows viewers how to use your product or a certain class of product will provide immense value for first-time visitors.
For one, it’s helpful to see how to use your product or service, spelled out for them in a visual medium (as discussed above). It gives you the opportunity to be creative and engaging while informative.
But secondly, using a third-party platform like YouTube or Vimeo gives internet users a potential alternate avenue to discover you and your business. If they began searches using terms often used in your industry and stumble upon your video, and then your site, that’s a user who never would have found you had you not created this particular content and posted it to that particular platform.
Boost your search engine optimization methods
SEO is an enormous part of building your web presence and brand. SEO is how you make your website easier to find and more valuable in search results than the sea of other, similar pages around the web.
Search engines—mainly Google, of course—love videos, and if you properly tag, title, and optimize your video, your rankings among people who use your search terms will skyrocket.
Another aspect of SEO is creating links back to your website. By creating multiple videos across multiple platforms that live on third-party sites, you create backlinks to your page that strengthen your website’s overall rank.  Â
Rack up some advertising dollars
Have you created a fantastic video that you’re sure will rack up page views? Why not put some advertising in front of it to garner some valuable ad dollars? You don’t want to bog down the rest of your page with banner or pop-up ads, and you don’t want to run excessively long commercials that encourage people to click off your video—but a quick ad that runs before your quality content is becoming the norm nowadays.
The revenue from video advertising might be small, but if you continue to make quality videos over time and build a diverse portfolio that brings in clicks, your views will add up. Â
Share the content of others and still win
Do you not have the means to make a video you can feel proud of at the moment? That’s fine.  There’s little stopping you from sharing other quality content that still adds value while building relationships with other brands.
Most YouTube videos are easy to share and even embed on your page, giving your site the SEO-boosting presence search engines love while potentially endearing yourself to the creator for sharing it to your audience. That way, when the time comes for you to share your own video, you’ll have a roster of friends you can reach out to and ask to promote your new content as well.
Implementing video is quickly becoming a crucial aspect of building an informative and engaging website. Whether you create your own content or use other people’s videos to make your point, don’t shy away from this increasingly dominant medium to tell your business’s story.
