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7 Types Of Videos Every Business Should Feature On Their Website

The post 7 Types Of Videos Every Business Should Feature On Their Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . 7 Videos Every Business Should Have On Their Website You’ve put together a pretty good first website for your business, and it’s doing OK. Visitors stick around, browse your store or view your portfolio, and contact you or make purchases. It’s a good start, for sure. But what if you want more customers, more sales and higher average order values without having to change your business model, product offerings, or services? Add videos. Here are five types of video that can help your business website earn you more customers and more revenue. 1. Product Demo Videos Sell products? You need product videos . You might not think that a 30-second video of someone opening and closing a purse or using a cordless drill is a valuable marketing tool, but the numbers don’t lie. Established online retailers have reported increases in conversion rates of anywhere from 64 to 85% higher for products with videos . Why? Especially for expensive products, customers want know as much as possible about the item before they buy. An effective product video, like this 39-second Tory Burch bag video at Zappos shows customers in detail what they’re getting. If you sell products online, you can still use testimonial videos. Embedding and sharing user-generated content and video reviews by customers delivers the impact of testimonials without the expense of producing your own content. Shoppers tend to trust customer-made videos and are 97% more likely to buy after they see user-created videos.   2. Case Study Videos Sometimes it’s hard to imagine attaining success without seeing an exemplary model. With most products, we need social proof to convince us that it can deliver results. Do your customers have complex problems to solve? You need case study videos . A case study is similar to a testimonial, but it shows a business audience how your product helped a client solve a particular problem, like rebranding a website in this HostGator video case study . As with a testimonial, you should include clients and let them talk about their experiences. You may also want to include some hard numbers to quantify exactly how much your business helped this client (for example, did you raise their traffic, revenue or something else) but don’t pelt viewers with too many spoken stats. Keep the overall message simple and easy to absorb and your customers will remember it better. You can streamline video production by creating a storyline prior to filming. You’ll also want to have your interview questions already prepared. These simple tasks will make the entire process run smoother.   3. Tutorial Videos Do your customers have questions? You need tutorial videos . Tutorials can keep your customers happy by showing them how to get the most value from what you sell. These videos can also persuade new customers to buy, because they can see the level of support they’ll get. The most effective tutorial videos walk viewers through each and every step in a process, like this tutorial on how to set up your WordPress website or blog. Another type of tutorial shows customers what they can do with your products. For example, Sephora produces tutorials on covering under-eye bags, achieving new nail art looks, doing wedding makeup, and more using products they sell. These videos typically cost more and take longer to produce than screen-based tutorials; if your business doesn’t have a Sephora-level marketing budget, user-generated tutorial videos are another option. And sometimes, tutorial videos are your product, or at least part of your product mix. This detailed post on using videos for infopreneurship , from product type to production. For example, in addition to in-studio classes and workshops, a growing number of dance performers and instructors now offer streaming video instruction and live online lessons on Patreon to expand their customer base far beyond their local market and the workshop circuit.   4. About Us Videos Want new customers? You need an “about us” video . Not only do customers want to put faces with names, they also want to get a sense of how your business operates and where it fits in the community. Thrift nonprofit Goodwill condenses more than 100 years of history into this short “about us” video that also showcases the group’s mission and international scope. Even if your business is brand-new, viewers will still want to know why you started it, how you take care of customers, who works with you, and how you make the products or deliver the services you sell. Just keep in mind the main rule of “about us” content – it’s really about showing what you can do for your customers. In addition to your main about us video, you can keep your video content for this section of your site fresh by embedding social video that you shoot at pop-up events, trade shows, and in your warehouse, workshop, or studio.   5. Webinar Videos Education is vital to attract and maintain your customers. By teaching your audience, they become experts in your product and in the industry. Webinars, live and recorded, can walk consumers through topics that help them do their jobs better. It’s hard for anyone to turn down a well-planned webinar that offers a new skill. When featuring these videos, your team should create engaging content that will teach and entertain your consumers. In the description, break down the objectives and who should attend.  Think about the different learning styles of your audience. You may want to include an additional handout or interrupt the monotony with a quick poll. Always give participants space to ask questions, too. That interaction will deliver more value to everyone on the webinar. ClearVoice educates its audience with monthly webinars. They invite experts to explain a specific topic and answer questions asked by attendees. Consumers can access the webinars via its site or on its YouTube channel. You’ll also want to consider the length of your webinar. Attendees may lose interest quickly if you try to trap them into a two-hour session. Instead, aim for a 20-minute or 45-minute webinar. It isn’t too late to teach your audience something different. Your team can build a learning environment with webinars.   6. Event Videos Let’s face it. Everyone can’t attend your amazing events. However, you can keep them engaged by capturing a few minutes on video.  Event coverage is effective because it keeps consumers up-to-date on your happenings, and it allows them to watch at their convenience. Depending on the event, be mindful of what and who you record. You may have to get attendees to sign a waiver form. Also, it’s nice to think about what you want to record. It may be unnecessary to record a whole 90-minute session; instead, you may want various shots from multiple sessions. Zendesk shared a talk presented by one of its team members. The presentation discussed an important topic for its audience—customer experiences: With event coverage, you can get creative. Maybe you can gather a few speakers and let them share their best business tip. Or you can do a funny blooper reel. This i s your moment to stand out from other companies. Use event videos as a way to connect your brand with consumers. Are you hosting a big conference soon? Or do you have a small workshop on your company agenda? Extend the shelf life of your event by recording it.   7. Company Culture Videos Selling your brand to customers isn’t an easy task. With so much competition in the market, people can buy products from multiple companies. Yet, some consumers usually stick to a few brands for all their purchases. That reality comes down to trust.  Consumers don’t just buy from any ol’ business. People buy from brands that they believe in.  Using video can help your team build consumer confidence, and highlighting your company’s culture can initiate the start of a positive brand relationship. Company culture is the living proof of your brand’s values. It reflects how you treat your employees and how you interact with your local community. BambooHR shows off its company culture in the video below. In a sincere, personal way, it spotlights the brand’s work-life balance and why the principle matters to the business. Company culture embodies everything from how you manufacture your products to the charities your brand champions. Giving customers just a tiny peek of how you operate can make a huge difference. These videos also help you attract new talent. Show future employees what it’s like to work at your office, and get them excited about joining your team. Get creative in your videos. Take viewers on a journey around your office, let employees talk about their work experiences, or even showcase how ideas become real-life products.   Videos for Your Business Website You may be thinking that this is a lot of video to plan, script, shoot, edit, and post, and you’re right. However, video doesn’t have to happen all at once, so start with one type of video and keeping going from there. Remember that video marketing, like other marketing, should be ongoing to reflect the evolution of your business and your audience. Video storytelling gives your brand a competitive edge. Do more than just tell consumers what you do, actually show them through visuals. Feature more videos. Press record. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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How Do Search Engines Work?

The post How Do Search Engines Work? appeared first on HostGator Blog . SEO 101: How Search Engines Work So much of your business depends on being visible in the search engines. You’d like to try to understand this thing that has so much power over your success. But figuring out how search engines work can be really confusing. And it’s not just you. There’s a whole industry based around trying to understand which sites rank for which reasons, and even the information we do know is changing all the time. We can’t provide an extensive rundown of how the Google algorithm works for you (no one can), but we can provide some basic information on how search engines work that may help remove some of the mystery. Here are a few of the main things you should know. The Search Engine’s Goals The first thing to understand about how search engines work is that their priority is providing the best possible results for what the searcher is looking for . When it comes to the natural results, the search engine is not concerned about how much a particular website owner might want to grab those top spots or think you deserve it – they only care about the people searching. By providing the information people need, a search engine can ensure those people keep coming back to use the site again. We know how well that’s worked for Google – many of us use it every day. That primary goal leads into the secondary goal that generates the company’s profits: making money on ads. Businesses pay to advertise on search engines in large part because they know a huge number of people use them every day. As long as Google keeps its users satisfied and coming back, advertisers will continue to keep the company profitable. So the search engine’s main concern is therefore how to make sure the results it delivers provide the most useful information for the consumer’s query. That’s where things start to get complicated.   Search Engine Index For a search engine to be able to identify the right web page for every possible query (or come as close as possible to such a lofty goal), it has to have a record of all the possible web pages online, along with some understanding of what’s on each of them. To do that, search engines create a massive index of web pages. This index attempts to identify and organize every website and web page on the web in a way that allows it to draw connections between the keywords people search for and the content included on each page. On top of all that, it needs to be able to assign relative quality to different web pages that cover the same topic.  This is tricky since all of this is happening with machines. People have a hard enough time agreeing on what constitutes “quality” content, but search engines have to determine it based on factors that machines can measure objectively.   Website Crawlers The first challenge of creating a search engine index is identifying all the web pages out there . This part of the job is up to website crawlers. Each time a website crawler discovers a page, it crawls the page, collecting all the relevant information on it needed for the search engine index. With that page added to the index, it then uses every link on that page to find new pages to crawl . Website owners can speed up the process of getting a website crawled by the search engines by submitting a sitemap and using internal linking. This is the easy part.   Search Engine Algorithms The second challenge of the search engine index is the much more complicated one: attributing relative value to all of the web pages . If the website crawler finds 100,000 pages that include content on them it deems relevant to a specific term, how does the search engine decide what order to deliver those results in? That’s where the search engine algorithm comes into play. Engineers at each of the big search engine companies have spent untold hours developing a complicated algorithm that uses a number of factors to assign relative value to websites and web pages.   Ranking Factors While there are many different factors that go into determining exactly why one page will rank over another – many more than we can summarize here, and more even than the greatest SEO expert knows – we have an idea of some of the most important search engine ranking factors Google and the other search engines take into account: Links – Links are the most important ranking factor, especially external links (those that point from one site to another) because every time another website links to yours, it signals to Google that there’s something authoritative or valuable on the page being linked to. When a web page that has a lot of other websites linking to it links to another site, that link is even more valuable because of the high authority the website already has. While everything else on this list matters, a LOT of determining rankings is based on the number and quality of links that point to a website. Website age – Older websites are generally seen as being more trustworthy and authoritative than new ones. Keywords – Search engines are always trying to provide the most relevant results, so they look for terms on the page related to the query of the person searching. The more you use related keywords , the more it signals to the search engine that your content is relevant. Mobile usability – Google has been upfront about using mobile usability as a ranking factor. If your website looks awesome on desktop, but has never been optimized for mobile use, then it could hurt you in the rankings. Page speed – People are impatient and therefore so are the search engines. A slow-loading page will rank lower because of it. Behavior data – Google tracks what people do once they get to the search engine results page (SERP). If someone clicks on a page and immediately backtracks – that’s a signal that the page didn’t provide what they were looking for . If instead they spend time on the page or even click through to different pages on the site once they get there, then it shows Google that the site provides value. Google and the other search engines have provided some information about the ranking factors they use, but they generally keep pretty quiet about how their search engine algorithms work. They don’t want people trying to manipulate the results – something that’s long been a problem with black-hat SEO practitioners.   Search Engine Optimization While there’s definitely a lot we don’t know about how search algorithms work, everything we do know has come to form the basis of the whole field of search engine optimization. SEO is competitive and you’re limited in what you can do to grab the rankings you most want for the keywords relevant to your business, but there’s still a lot you can control and do. Our series on SEO basics will dive deeper into some of the ranking factors you can control and how to optimize your website to perform better in the search engines. Check back soon for the rest of the series. Don’t miss the rest of the articles in our SEO 101 series! How to Write Compelling Title Tags Writing the Best Meta Descriptions What’s the Best URL Structure? Website Architecture Best Practices Want to boost your website rankings? Get expert help with HostGator’s SEO services. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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‘Cloud’ vs ‘Shared’ Hosting

Hello! I’m new to the ‘reselling world’ but am starting to write my business plan and get my sh*t together (after months and months of ‘t… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1720532&goto=newpost Continue reading

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