Video E-Commerce and SEO: Lights! Camera! Action!
They're also driving revenue with online video. Web pages with video are, on average, ranked much higher than those without. What's more, Google presents video-powered search results as part of its universal search result pages (the standard search that most people use). Those searches are much more appealing and eye-catching than their textual counterparts because they have video properties and a video thumbnail attached, taking up more page real estate. Three factors drive your ability to achieve a higher SEO ranking using video:
1. Video markup: Accomplish proper video markup within each page that contains video by using suitable video formats and URL structures, as well as by exposing all video information to search engines in the HTML code that surrounds the video.
2. Video sitemap: XML-based video sitemaps actively publish video information from one central location to make it easier for search engines to discover it, thereby increasing its potential exposure.
3. Syndication: Distribute your videos across different channels (e.g., video networks, social networks) and let your users distribute it as well to gain maximum visibility.
While retailers should follow the same SEO principles for video that they do to maintain the rest of their site, a surprisingly limited number of them seem to be following established SEO practices when it comes to video.
Approaches to Smart
Video Generation
The effort and required expertise involved in creating video content for websites is often noted as a reason for not embracing video. However, this has been fertile ground for a variety of vendors to emerge, an ecosystem around online retail videos that focuses on providing online retailers with high-quality, cost-effective video content. Considerations when choosing a video production service should include cost, flexibility, ability to scale and keep up with catalog updates, and quality of video. Retailers are immediately presented with three, often complementary, options for video production. They include the following:
1. Manual production. Retailers can produce videos that are tailored to best fit the product they're selling. They'll find, however, that videos can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars per video to produce. For a brand with a smaller product catalog with few changes, this method can be effective. Some retailers may also choose to manually produce video for their best-selling products, and use automatic video-generation solutions as a complementary method to turn the rest of their significantly sized product catalog into video.
2. Syndication of manu
facturer videos. This refers to video syndication services that are made by the product manufacturers. They're typically free, but the downside is they're not customized to retailers' needs, so they may not:
a. cater to their target audience;
b. adhere to the branding and look and feel of the rest of the website;
c. keep information up to date (e.g., price);
d. emphasize the competitive advantages of the retailer (e.g., "free shipping on this product"); or
e. have an embedded call to action (e.g., having an "add to cart" link in select points within the video).
3. Automatic video generation. Solutions are available that are tailored to individual audiences, adhere to branding, are dynamic and scalable, and have calls to action that manual videos may not. In fact, automatic video generation achieves most of what manual production offers at a fraction of the cost, with the added ability to scale and always remain up to date.
