The most expensive film of all time is Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (On Stranger Tides), with a budget of $410 million USD. A great deal of this was spent on special effects, that are layered so densely that the audience is completely immersed in this swashbuckler fantasy.
Your business doesn’t have to direct Pirates of the Caribbean 4 in order to produce a business video that gets results. The main thing is just having a video, even just a ‘YouTube slideshow’ on your business website, and this will improve your Google rankings.
Isn’t this redundant content? Won’t it be bad marketing? These questions will be answered, but the key to all this is ‘session duration’–
Session Duration: the Achilles heel of the small business website
How long do you really think people spend on your website? This is average time on site is termed ‘session duration’, which is something that Google pays close attention to.
Unfortunately, most business websites are not Nickelodean.com. You don’t have millions of kids ecstatically playing games and watching videos on your site for hours on end. Nickelodean probably has an astronomical session duration (average), whereas your business website is sadly, probably less entertaining. People click onto your site, make a quick judgement, extract some quick info and get out. That’s why many business websites are below the average session duration of 53 seconds (for searches coming from Google).
But small business websites fare even worse than that…
People don’t usually make in-depth decisions when selecting a small business. They glance at a few websites, then call the one that takes their fancy.
Plus, you may have a one-page website. We are all-for one-page websites in every way. We think they get the most customer conversions for small businesses, and at an unbeatable price. Yet, they also have the Achilles heel of a low session duration.
Thankfully there is a way to give session duration a marked boost. You need to have a simple video embedded on your site.
This video should be 1.5 to 2 minutes long. The visitors who watch it will give your session duration a sizeable boost.
But one thing is still one your mind: how can a mediocre video actually be good for marketing?
So you’re probably sold on the idea that a video will get you better Google rankings, but for the people who actually watch the video, won’t it be bad for their impression of your business?
A bad video can be pretty bad. It can be just a rehash of the content and images of your site, along with some lame transition effects that wouldn’t have wowed audiences of the 1950s.
But actually, there are two reasons why your business video can actually be a very good one, even without big budget CGI or Johnny Depp:
- Having a video is impressive per se
- There is an easy way to make a very good business video
Let’s explain these…
Merely having a video is impressive for a small business
Videos are the gold standard in content, and everyone knows they are hard to produce. No one expects a small business to have a video, but when you have one, they know you mean business. There’s nothing more to say really.
There is an easy way to make a small business video that will impress
You would be surprised how sophisticated a slideshow-like video can look when you follow this guide:
- Write some brief lines of text. These shouldn’t repeat your website’s content, they should serve a useful function: to summarise and consolidate your website.
- Select images to insert between the ‘slides’ of text. These images will be ones that you didn’t use on your site. So now you’ve given the video another useful function: as an image gallery.
- Add your logo, phone number and URL as well.
- Add transition effects to string the slides together into a video. You will need to use an app like Animoto rather than PowerPoint.
We make a video like this for every Jetsite that we create. A Jetsite is a one-page website that was designed to be the optimum website for small- to medium-sized businesses. It is simple and affordable, yet ranks extremely well on Google and excels at getting visitors to call your phone number. Click here to learn more about our Jetsites.