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84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video (HubSpot). Knowing that video is so effective, you develop a brand video and get ready to distribute it, but then you hit a wall…does the video belong on the home page of your website?
There’s a myriad of arguments both for and against having videos on the home page of your website. In this article I’m going to cover some of the key arguments and then give you a final verdict.
Here’s what we’ll be covering:
Reasons for Videos on Your Homepage
There are certainly times when video shouldn’t be used on your home page, but what are the reasons for using video on the home page?
Here’s a list of the reasons you should use videos on your home page:
- Videos convey information quickly and concisely
- Content consumption is moving to video at an ever-growing rate
- Better engagement for users on your website
Conveying information quickly and concisely
One of the 5 things your website should do include saying less. In other words, the less words you can use, the better. Why? Because in general, users scroll through information, rather than reading every part of it.
What better way to take advantage of this fact by conveying information in a fast and concise way – through the use of video. By using video, we are ultimately following the principle of ‘say less’. It takes up less space on the page and conveys more information in a quicker amount of time and with less said.
Content consumption is moving to video
The global average for video consumption is 84 minutes per day (Media Daily News) and this number is continuing to increase. In today’s digital age, it’s safe to say video consumption is becoming the norm and is beginning to replace traditional forms of media consumption such as blog articles.
As such, it makes sense to take advantage of this growing trend by using video on your home page. Since you know that users are more likely to watch a video than read text, it makes sense to utilise video on your home page to convey your brand’s unique message.
Better engagement for users on your website
Data shows that video engagement rate stays high between 40% and 53% for videos up to 30 minutes. For videos between 30 and 60 minutes, it drops to 26% then to 13% for videos over an hour. (HubSpot)
This is an extremely high engagement rate and suggests that you should use video on your home page in order to drive higher engagement levels with your brand.
With higher engagement comes a greater level of interest in your brand’s products and services, ultimately resulting in a greater number of leads, sales, and thus revenue.
When Video on the Homepage Isn’t the Way to Go
Videos shouldn’t be used on the home page when:
- You already engage users well with your content
- You don’t have relevant, high quality brand videos
- It’s going to be going to be coded on your site in a way that slows it down considerably
You already engage users well with your content
If the content you have on your homepage conveys your brand’s message and clearly explains your products and services, then you don’t necessarily need a video on the homepage.
How can you best convey your brand’s message and what you do? Storybrand is one framework that helps you solve this problem. One thing you will notice about all Storybrand sites is you can tell immediately what the site is about and it’s all about the customer (think more ‘you’’ language’ and less ‘we’ language).
What Storybrand website’s don’t usually do is have a video on their homepage – because it doesn’t add to the clarity of their message.
Sometimes, forcing something just for the sake of its benefits can lead to downsides that aren’t worth it in the first place. Such is the case with videos on your homepage – if it’s not absolutely necessary to convey a message with video and you already convey this relatively well without video, then there’s no need to push the agenda of videos on the homepage.
You don’t have videos
This one is captain obvious but if you don’t have relevant, high quality brand videos, then there’s not much to add video-wise!
The point here is if you don’t have videos don’t skimp on cheap animated videos or be concerned that’s what you need to convey your brand’s message – you don’t.
But Wait, Won’t Video on my Homepage be Bad for SEO?
Yes and no. It’s not that simple, let’s discuss.
We know for a fact that videos on any website page can slow down the load speed of that page. Page speed is an important factor for SEO, so it’s natural to think that it’s better not to use video on the homepage because of this.
We used to say videos on the homepage are big SEO no-no’s but we have changed our view on this in recent years – provided clients meet key criteria.
On the homepage you’re generally only trying to rank for your brand. This implies however you have dedicated pages for all of your services and a good content marketing strategy that covers key terms your buyers are searching for.
Here’s what one of our team members at our Partner IMPACT+ had to say:
In other words, yes, having videos on the homepage decrease page speed, which negatively impacts SEO. However, it should only impact the SEO ranking for that specific page, not every page on your website. Generally speaking, you’re not really trying to rank highly for a range of keywords with your homepage (excluding your brand terms, which you want to rank highly for).
This also means if you have a pretty light website and you don’t have pages for key product/service areas then your relying on your homepage to rank for everything and videos on your homepage won’t help.
It’s also important to note that not all videos on the homepage are equal (neither are all developers). Short of getting too technical, our advice would be to have videos coded via efficient methods such as utilising lazy load.
Long story short – yes videos on your homepage aren’t great for your SEO for that page, but it’s not supposed to rank for key terms if you have product/service pages, so you shouldn’t let this deter you from using videos on your homepage.
So, Should I Have Videos on my Homepage?
To sum up, you should have videos on your home page if the following are true:
- It’s going to add to the messaging and clarity of how you help buyers
- Is engaging and adds a vibe/tone conducive to your message
If one of the above isn’t true, then you should probably reconsider whether you really need to use videos on your homepage.
