Adding Streaming Video To Your Website

With the advent of improved web technologies and faster internet speeds, the one thing you often see implemented on new websites these days is a flash video of some sort, usually an introduction to the site or a brief summary of how the site works. It all sounds good on the surface, but does it affect your site’s usability and your search engine optimisation efforts?

You may think a video playing on your website will help to increase conversions, or keep them on your site that little bit longer. However, evidence actually suggests a video can have adverse effects on your site, depending on how it’s implemented. Let’s say you decide to make your introductory video autoplay when a user first gets to your site - you might be surprised to hear that this makes a lot of people leave the site immediately. Analytics on one website that did this shows a spike in the homepage’s bounce rate from below 30% to around the 70% mark. That’s 7 out of 10 users leaving your site just because of a video! They might be in an office and so the sudden burst of sound could attract unwanted attention, or perhaps they are one of the substantial number of people still on a low internet connection who simply don’t want to wait for the page and video to load.

To be fair, there is a fairly simple compromise. Make sure the video doesn’t play automatically, and you shouldn’t notice a huge difference in your bounce rate. This change was made on the website already mentioned before, and their bounce rate quickly dropped right back down again to an acceptable level.

It’s still worth keeping a close eye on your analytics, as it can be interesting to see what the right presentation in a video can do for your conversion rates.

Rik
SEO Programmer

Listen to this podcast

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post
TrackBack URI

Leave a comment