5 Reasons why including video in your blog posts drives more leads to your business

Creating engaging content on your website is still one of the best ways to increase traffic, drive online sales, and build your brand.

However, with +500 million blogs in existence since 2019, and with a good number of these being business-driven blogs, the market for content is becoming increasingly saturated. This means that for blogging to be a worthwhile undertaking in 2020 the standard of content that you produce has to be exceptional.

Business blogging should be seen as a competition for clicks and conversions between you and your competitors. One of the most effective ways of getting a leg up on your competition, as far as the quality and effectiveness of your content is concerned, is by including videos in your blog posts.

Blog posts with embedded videos drive and convert more traffic to your business than posts with nothing but text and images.

Here are 5 reasons why having video in your posts generates more leads and converts more prospects for your business:

1) Having video content in your posts allows you to rank better in search for both Google and Youtube

The two most commonly used search engines in the world are Google and Youtube. There are now many searches, including “how-to” and other instructional searches, where people begin their search on Youtube rather than Google.

When you have videos embedded in your blog, the video itself can rank for keywords related to your post on Youtube. It is worth noting that this is only the case if the video in question is uploaded to Youtube and made public before it is embedded in your post.

High-quality videos that perfectly answer specific searches can also rank at the top of Google. You give yourself the best chance of doing this if you do the following:

Create long-form videos that go into depth on a particular topic
Put the right keywords in your video’s title, tags, and description (Youtube descriptions should be seen as a mini-blog post accompaniment for your video, and contain a link back to your website)
Make sure your video provides the best possible answer to a query so that viewers engage positively with it. Examples of such positive engagement include likes, comments, shares, and watching the video all the way through.

The utilization of Youtube as a search engine is only open to you if you have videos in your posts. Having videos in your posts opens up the possibility to tap into a vast well of traffic that simply would not be available for text-only posts.

2) Having video content in your blog posts will increase your dwell time, giving you more visibility in Google

Google increasingly looks to user-engagement metrics when deciding what the best pages are to rank for a given query.

User-engagement metrics refers to a user’s behavior on a page. If a user spends time on a page, scrolls down to the bottom of a page, or jumps through to another page on your website then Google sees this as a searcher liking the content on your page and therefore the page being a good fit for the searched query.

If, on the other hand, a searcher quickly clicks off a page, and onto another page in the search engine results page (SERP), then Google sees this as a signal that your page is a poor answer to a searcher’s query. Your page could get demoted down a SERP as a result.

Having videos in your blog will increase the time that a user spends on your page (dwell time) due to the additional time spent watching your video. This provides positive user engagement signals to Google, meaning that your blog will end up with more organic visibility and ultimately more traffic.

Given that the leads driven by blogging is a factor of the overall traffic that comes into your blog, and its conversion rate, having greater organic visibility will increase the number of leads that come out of your blogging efforts.

3) Videos will improve the lead conversion rates of your blog posts by humanizing your business

According to Wordstream, videos on landing pages can increase that page’s conversion rate by around 80%.

One of the big reasons behind this is that videos can humanize the business behind a piece of content. While a blog post can be useful and informative at the time of reading, it is often forgotten about once it has served its purpose.

Given humans’ natural propensity to remember faces and people better than abstract information, showing the people behind your business through a video can build a sense of trust with your target audience. This can result in extra conversions directly from your post and will make visitors more likely to return to your website in the future.

It takes on average 8 interactions with a business before a visitor becomes a lead, the ability to make a human connection and stay in the memory of your target audience can help your blogs drive more leads and revenue.

4) Having video content in your post makes it more shareable on social media

Having video in your blog post allows you to take a portion of that video to use to “preview” your article when you push it out on social channels.

The benefits of being able to incorporate video into your social posts are twofold. Firstly many of the social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin give greater visibility to video-based posts than ones that contain images or text. This will result in a greater deal of social traffic being driven to your posts.

Secondly, video-based posts can provide a “pattern interrupt” that disrupts the flow of someone scrolling through their user feed. This can also lead to more traffic driven to your content from social media, giving you greater scope to drive leads through your blogging efforts.

5) Video can dramatically improve the overall quality of your content, particularly for visual topics

Perhaps the most important reason why having video in your blogs can lead to more leads being won through your blogging efforts is that video content can simply improve the overall quality of your blog posts.

This is particularly true for visual topics where an explanation of the subject at hand is difficult in text and images alone. Posts offering step-by-step guides on practical tasks, say on how to use certain features on a video editing software, for example, are made far more useful with the addition of an explainer video.

Although you could argue that this does not directly drive leads, it is well worth remembering that your blogging is meant to showcase your expertise to potential customers. Therefore the greater value that your audience derives from your content the more likely they are to return to your site and eventually become a lead.

To Recap
Using video in your blog can help your blog drive more leads as it both increases the potential reach of your blog posts and can, in some cases dramatically, increase the conversion rate of your posts.

In particular, the fact that video opens up traffic from Youtube, and can greatly increase the traffic you drive from social platforms, means that it should be an integral part of any business blogging strategy.

Oli Graham is the Marketing Manager at digital copywriting agency RightlyWritten