Is Your Website Properly Optimized for Video? Three Tips to Get You Ahead of the Competition

Featured article by Jennifer Livingston, Independent Technology Author

If you’re a company looking for new ways to draw in your target audience, then you’ll need to incorporate video into your marketing campaign. What many brands don’t realize when they are working with video is that you can have a killer video — and it will fall flat if your website is not optimized to handle it. If you want to incorporate video into your content marketing strategy, then make sure your optimization goes hand-in-hand. Here are the three top tips you need to take when you are preparing your website for multimedia:

Tip #1: Speed It Up

One of the top inhibitors to video on a website is a slow load time. If you’ve filled your website with videos only to have viewers click on them and get stalled, you’re probably going to frustrate them. In seconds they will leave — looking for a video or another website that they can watch immediately. To counter this, make sure your website is optimized for speed. It’s worth it to pay a little extra to make sure your site is running as quickly as it can.

Tip #2: Add a Title That Makes a Viewer Click

An easy way to make sure your video is optimized for your website is to test out different titles for your video. A catchy title that makes a viewer click on it is one of the secrets to reach and engagement — and you’ll see a surge in your analytics if you’ve got a great headline. One fun and effective way to test your headlines are to include a blurb about your video in an email or social media post that clicks through to your website. You’ll be able to track how many people and the demographics of your clickers. From there, you can tweak your headlines to be catchier and more inviting. The key is to create urgency and suspense without promising your viewers something you cannot deliver on by showing them the video.

Tip #3: Invest in Subtitling Services

Finally, if you want to reach the widest audience, you’ll need to make your video available to people in your global markets and to people with disabilities. That’s when closed captioning optimization really can make a difference. You can upload transcriptions of your videos directly to YouTube. You can partner with a subtitling service to caption your video transcripts in the languages of your top international markets and experiment with how many people click on your videos and the amount of time they spend watching them. This is an experiment that will teach you a great deal about your audiences and give you clues on how you can develop new, niche markets simply by learning to communicate effectively with potential customers. If they can hear you — and your message is strong — then you’re on your way to capturing them as part of your new customer base. But you won’t know until you try!

You’re wasting your time if you are investing your resources into polished and engaging multimedia content but you’re not hosting those assets on a platform that is making them easy to be watched and shared. You can’t host videos on your website without optimizing them — and that can be done in a variety of ways. The three most important tips are in this guide — and when you’re short on time, money and energy, these three steps are going to help you get ahead of your competition. In a tech-crazed world in which you are constantly vying for the attention of your audience, you have to do everything you can to make sure your content is seen. Don’t miss out on those opportunities by failing to optimize your website for video.