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Video better than Banners? PDF Print E-mail
Written by D. Eric Franks   
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 09:11

Having video on your Website could be more important than placing banner ads in some situations, at least according to Robert Davis, Interactive Marketing Director/Leader of Interactive Video for Ogilvy Interactive: “…video and search have really started to gel. … the traffic that we can drive of off search now in some cases is enough for a campaign where they don’t have to have a paid component with it.” His work has shown that the impact of video on site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will drive more traffic to your site than banners, which we can assume are more narrowly targeted. I would think that the huge upside to this is that video is a one-time cost for a company, while banner ads have on-going costs for as long as you run the campaign.

Of course there's no reason to do one and not the other, but it seems obvious from this research (and other examples) that video is a sure fire way to not only educate your customers and sell your product, but it's also pretty much a mandatory advertising tool for companies that want to get noticed on the Web.

That, of course, raises a number of questions:

  • What kind of video? Instructional? Educational? Pure Sales?
  • How much will a simple 5 minute video cost to produce?
  • Do you produce it yourself or hire out?
  • Does your choice of video hosting affect SEO? Is it better to host on your own server or go with YouTube (which is owned by google)?
  • What formats are best? Is having a goofball Flash Walk-on-Web Host enough?
  • What metadata do you need to embed in a video file to get it noticed?

References:
* Search Engines are Just Waiting for Your Video Content

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Discuss (2 posts)

Dugdale
Video better than Banners?
Oct 28 2009 20:16:07
This thread discusses the Content article: Video better than Banners?

Great job Eric, good to see you have the title tag issue fixed. Let me know when you see traffic increase.
 #2651

D. Eric Franks
Re:Video better than Banners?
Oct 28 2009 21:03:15
Thanks for your help (and your offer for more too!)

I still haven't figured all of the details in Joomla out, but I did figure out that the template was overridding the titles... grrr. Only took me 3 hours to figure that out.
________

To the topic at hand, I am very curious about what kinds of video are supposed to bump SERanks. Seems like YouTube might not hurt for Google. But what about just a little FLV video on a page? Since everyone's got SWF everywhere, that seems that wouldn't count. And is it just random video? Can I put a clip of a kitty on my page and instantly gain a little SEO?

Still, the assertion that video can be more effective than banners is pretty remarkable.
 #2652

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