The Benefit of Product Videos for SEO:
Increase Sales + Improve Organic Search Rankings
by Brian Marine - January, 2010

It is a proven fact that businesses that add video to their web sites gain numerous benefits. Among them are higher visitor retention, greater customer loyalty, and an increase of sale conversions. For eCommerce and online retailer, having product videos in their shopping carts can provide dramatic sales conversion increases. But what you may not know is that there can be another huge bonus of a completely different kind from creating online videos … in search engine optimization (SEO).

Attaining first page organic search rankings on Google is a very difficult, and often very costly, thing. And depending on the keywords you wish to rank for … maybe an impossible thing. Companies large and small agonize over how to achieve higher natural search rankings, as they are "free", as opposed to the high cost of driving traffic to their sites via pay-per-click.

I put "free" in quotes, because we also know that huge sums of money are often spent on SEO … either in-house or by hiring outside consultants and SEO firms. It is difficult, costly and time-consuming to try and get your site ranked highly for relevant keywords. And online retailers know that theirs is an even more difficult task when trying to improve the rank of shopping cart product SKU pages.

Kill Two Birds With One Stone

I actually don't like that phrase (I happen to like birds), but converting your static product content into video can accomplish two things … the other being a really excellent SEO-related bonus. Using a service like TubeMogul allows you to batch upload your product videos to the major video search sites like YouTube, Google Video, MSN Video, and so on.

Aside from the obvious benefit of having hundreds of your branded product videos that can be found via sites like YouTube, getting ranked on the first page of Google itself becomes MUCH easier and more likely for these videos.Why? Because Google now ranks video results very highly when compared with HTML SERPs (in fact, video clickthroughs now rank 2nd only to news for total clickthroughs on Google). Another benefit is that video searches are MUCH less competitive than HTML page searches. How much less?

Forrester Research recently said that for keywords on which video results were offered, an average of 16,000 videos were competing for space on results pages - which contained an average of 1.5 video results per page. This means that each video had roughly an 11,000-to-1 chance of ranking on the first page of results. In comparison, for non-standard HTML results, there was an average of 4.7 million results competing for a spot on results pages with an average of 9.4 text results per page, or a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results. If you compare the likelihood of a video result appearing on the first page with that of a standard HTML result, indexed videos have, roughly, a 50 times greater chance of making the first page.

So what are you waiting for? Contact Marine Creative about converting your static product content into videos that can help get those product SKUs ranked more highly on Google (without paying enormous SEO fees), which will bring more customers to your shopping cart pages … and once on your site, those videos will help convert more of them into customers & sales!