The bMighty Blog -- Sales/Marketing

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, goes the famous New Yorker cartoon. Nobody has to know you’re a smaller business either – and videos are one of the most effective ways to look bigger and impress the search engines, if you do it right.

On SearchEngineLand.com, Glenn Pingul has some impressive statistics on the impact of videos for small businesses. Now, admittedly Pingul runs an online video advertising company but the results he demonstrates should make smaller businesses think twice.

Pingul writes in his column that he works with an agency that specializes in marketing and sales for large-scale condominium developments -- and the individual small and midsize businesses who manage those properties. He writes: “For several months, we’ve been testing video ads on the agency’s web site, in ad networks, and in both search engine marketing and organic video search. For some property videos on the agency’s web site, we’ve seen views-to-impressions ratios as high as 70% (similar to the luxury broker we talked about last month) and conversions (actions-to-views ratios) of almost 40%. We believe these amazing ratios reflect the value of keeping video relevant to what viewers expect to see when they view it.”

These are impressive results but there is a caveat: Pingul notes that on Google video search, the agency videos managed to get into six of the top ten video search returns on what he calls “some pretty broad search terms related to condos in their market.” But the same “broad search terms” in a regular Google search, resulted in the agency’s videos appearing on the seventh search engine results page -- as the 75th result.

As Pingul points out this little exercise signifies “both the promise of online video and the still-early nature of video used in organic search.” It also indicates that smaller businesses need to know what they’re doing when using videos to realize its full potential.

Pingul offers some advice like the importance of relevance, using focused keywords, creating useful content, and optimizing the videos for performance. On the flip side, Pingul warns smaller businesses to avoid redundant multiple postings – which doesn’t necessarily result in higher rankings – and, just to emphasize the important of being relevant, he emphasizes the importance of avoiding irrelevant content. This is only going to get more important as online video increases.

For more information on Web-based videos, check out our Q&A with Ben Wayne and our recommendations for Web-based video options for smaller businesses.

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