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Search, Video Content Bolster Digital Marketing Efforts

Websites have come a long way from the early days of the Internet when they were not much more than digital brochures. To keep visitors engaged longer, today’s websites need to provide more.

Even if your website is designed well and offers lots of valuable content, visitors don’t want to invest the time and effort to sort through it all. Enhanced search capabilities provide the tools to help visitors find what they’re looking for quickly and easily will keep them on your site longer and make it their top information source.

And, videos can make a significant contribution to your overall marketing strategy. It enables you to make a bigger impact in less time than it would take for someone to read the same content in a printed article. Videos also are visually stimulating and emotional, allowing you to forge a stronger connection with your target audience.

Two types of search

The most effective search function facilitates both “faceted” and “federated” searches to yield the most relevant results. Faceted searches enable users to apply filters to quickly narrow down their results based on certain predefined categories, such as news, blogs or videos, whereas federated searches cull results from a variety of internal and external sources such as other websites or online communities.

Studies also have found that a well-oiled search capability generates more revenue because people who search are twice as likely to convert than those who do not. In the research by Econsultancy, companies had an average overall ecommerce conversion rate of 2.77%. However, the conversion rate nearly doubled to 4.63% from people who used on-site search and found what they were looking for.

Video Best Practices

Video is becoming increasingly integral to digital marketing. Videos should be tagged and their descriptions should include popular keyword search terms to ensure they come up in both federated and faceted searches. A good content management system such as Sitefinity can import videos posted on third-party content delivery networks such as YouTube, so they load quicker and take up less storage space on your website server.

Your videos should always tell a story, but it should be as brief as possible. People are more likely to watch and share videos that are less than a minute long. You can go beyond the one-minute mark, but the story has to be very engaging in order to keep people's attention.

The story also should incorporate the “3 Tells” storytelling technique: In the introduction, tell people what you plan to tell them; in the body, tell your story; and in the conclusion, summarize what you have told them.

Because videos help make complex information easier to grasp, they are great tools to use for tutorials or manuals. But videos should always complement, rather than replace, other related content on your website.

Search, Video and SEO

A well-executed video can reach a large audience and generate a significant number of shares on social media, and when more people share your videos, it helps you get more backlinks. Relevant backlinks are among the most important SEO ranking signals.

In addition, Google's algorithm loves rich content, so adding videos can get your association website better placement on search engine results, which also increases your site’s ranking. Google also rewards content that is timely and relevant.

Taken together, an effective search function and short, captivating videos will enhance the experience of your website visitors, motivating them to stay longer. And the more time visitors spend on your website, the higher your SEO rankings will be, making your association the go-to source for news and information relevant to your target market.