How to Use Video on Your Website

Search engine algorithms are a mystery. There are SEO practices that website professionals generally agree help your rankings, but no one but Google knows the extent to which these practices affect search results.

That being said, one of the most widely accepted principles of SEO is that website video increases your rankings in Google!

While there are huge benefits to putting video on your site, it’s important to follow a few best practices to make sure you’re taking full advantage of everything video production has to offer.

High quality videos files are usually very large, which can take up a lot of space on your site. Large images and videos can slow your site down tremendously, which can increase your bounce rate and decrease your conversions! Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to this: a video host.

Sites like YouTube and Vimeo will host your videos and allow you to embed them on your webpage. This takes the load off of your site and allows these hosts to carry that load for you, which helps your site speeds immensely.

Paid services like Wistia, Vidyard, or Vimeo allow you to embed videos onto your site with customized branding and formatting. It saves you from having to code the sizing and formatting after you embed the video, and allows you to more easily make the videos on your site look like they belong.

If you aren’t a web developer, chances are you’re building your site with a website builder like WordPress. Using Oembed will allow you to distance yourself even further from coding, because all you have to do is paste a URL on your site–no HTML or code to deal with! More importantly, it will also decrease your page load times. Oembed makes your site faster by loading image previews on your webpage until the user clicks to play your video–rather than loading the entire video on page load. Using a paid hosting site like Wistia allows you to receive the benefits of Oembed without the downsides that come with YouTube or Vimeo.

High quality video production is an investment that can increase sales and customer delight in huge ways. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of that investment by using a video host that displays your video in a quick, responsive, and professional manner!