Best length for a video on a website
-
Most of us deal with UI/UX questions and SEO questions from clients on a daily basis. I was discussing video length with a client recently and I realized that he was in his video. This made me think about the thrill of seeing yourself in video might cause someone to make their video longer at the expense of UX. So, I thought I would put it to the Moz community. If a company is doing a "typical" home page "Explainer" video that tells about a company. This can be in the B2B or B2C sectors. I want to withhold my opinion at this point for the discussion.
-
When I worked in the newspaper industry and they started to use video, we were always told to keep it to under a minute and a half - I think if you go beyond that then people lose interest. Even so, if you go to the full time it has to be interesting throughout. The shorter the better really and don't do it for the sake of it - it has to add something for the viewer.
-
The answer to this would have to be "it depends" but in general my opinion would be a home page explainer should be 30-60 seconds.
But this is a clear situation where opinions or personal preferences are useless - let the data tell you what the visitors demand. This question screams for split testing - or at the very least doing close Analytics tracking via events to know how many even start the video, how long they watch, and whether they watch to the end.
Just showing the client that - say - fewer than 20% watch the video past 30 seconds would settle the discussion pretty quickly.
My $0.02
Paul
-
I appreciate this and that you added two to three minutes. I was trying to avoid detail for fear of contaminating people's opinions. My discussion came up with a service business that wanted what we call an explainer video. In other words: this is the problem, this is the solution, and this is why we are the choice.
Typically, I do not like these to run beyond 90 seconds and feel like anything closer to 60 seconds is better. The one for this client is animated, but we have another client who does videos and "stars" in them. They tend to be longer and, in agreement with your first point, I think they lose people.Thanks again, EGOL,
Robert
-
Even the tiny businesses that I run have a diversity of clients and types of clients. Far too many to summarize well in one short video. I believe that the message should be customized different types of clients.
If I was making videos they would be one click below the homepage. There I would post very short videos that simply present the product range, the value propositions that we offer our clients, and the support that we provide to help clients be successful. What we do for YOU.
Each business service or major product category would have one of these videos.
Instead of showing the CEO's face in these videos, I think it would be better to feature the staff members who will do the actual work and interface with the clients. Show staff in the work areas and offices where client work is accomplished. The goal is to show the experts who offer their skills and services and the assets that we have to accomplish the work.
How long? Two or three minutes.
I think it would be better to cover a limited range of information. That way the video is relevant to the listener's interests and not go into services that are not what the visitor has clicked into.
-
+1
This remind me when i talking about websites with some movie director. His idea was "all sites should have something cover page, when you visit it for first time you should see it. Even see this page every time on your visits as initial.". I was WTF?
-
I agree, this is excellent. So, assuming that it is about their services how long are you willing to endure? Obviously, if they are not getting to a point, etc. you are going to leave before it ends no matter what. My interest in this is in trying to get clients to understand what works vs. what looks good to them.
Do you look at video length when you begin to watch it or before you hit play? Does a certain length make you less likely to go forward?Thanks as always EGOL,
Robert
-
"typical" home page "Explainer" video that tells about a company.
I'd rather see explainer videos about products and services. Information that I want and need.
An explainer video "about a company".... sounds kinda sleepy.... I go to Wikipedia for that type of info because C-level company people are going to be thumpin' their chests and I'd rather read just the facts, presented with lots of subheadings so I can jump over what I don't need to know.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to outrank list and lifestyle websites
Hi everyone, We have a fully optimised client site with Moz optimisation scores of 95% and above. Each month we also create 1-2 backlinks. However, for the keywords we track, our client's site is stuck and no longer moving up at the bottom of page 1 and further down to page 2 and 3. The keywords ranking on first page are also getting very low click through rates - between 1% and 3%. The sites that outrank us are a mix of: Top X Places to visit... X Best Places to see... Trip advisor Things to do in... A guide to the best... Is there a chance for us to outrank the type of sites above? Will persevering in link building do the trick? I understand this may take a while because we have a fixed time and budget for each of our clients. If we can't outrank these lifestyle and list sites, will beating just direct competitors be enough? However, this won't change the low CTR issue... Another solution we're looking at is to change our keywords, which may be a bit tough because the current ones we track, even though they are a little broad, are exactly what the client offer and already have low search volumes. Going more specific will surely have lesser search volumes. Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | nhhernandez0 -
Site´s Architecture - Categories . What´s the best in my case?
My Dear friends of MOZ, I´ve got you a case that has been driving me crazy for 2 weeks, Im doing an SEO audit for big brand that sells electronics. Since they sell all kind of electronics, and are very popular the site is quite big and has several categories. Now...Im working particularly in a kind of micro-site that sells two kind of products that are very similar but not the same. Lets say in this site they are selling super-light-weight-Laptops and tablets, so if you look the site its a Laptop/Tablet site. But the site is not under a laptop/tablet directory, some pages are under laptop and others in Tablet directory . For example : Home page URL: /light-laptops/home.asp ; Products general page page URL is light-pads/products.asp ; and each single product page is under laptops or pads according the type of product. From my point of view, they should create a new directory called /light-laptops-pads/ and single directories for products, and case studies, etc.. Since they want to show both products together when you click in products (off course they will be creating sub-directories for the two types of products). At the begining I thought they were really mistaken, but now that I see that all light-pad content is in one folder and light-laptops content is in another, and the site jumps from one category to the other I am a little bit confused. PLEASE HELP ME PD: I want to make clear that general categories like products, case studies , contact us, solutions pages are in some cases under /light-pad/ directory and in other cases under /light-laptops / directory PLEASE PARDON MY ENGLISH!
Algorithm Updates | | facupp10 -
Do Explainer Videos Help SEO?
My company makes explainer videos. I often come across a lot of (seemingly) inflated & unprovable stats, pertaining to explainer videos, from other companies. This article claims that "Having an explainer video on your web page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google search results" Is there any real data to back up such a claim? Do explainer videos really help SEO? How?
Algorithm Updates | | WickVideo0 -
Website Recovery
We have a client who is experiencing much in the way off duplicated content and broken, spammed inbound links. While we are removing and correcting everything using google webmaster, I'm hearing stories of websites not being able to recover from algorithms/penalties applied because of this. My client had around 250 inbound links to their website and over the space of 3 weeks mounted over 8,000 unethical links. Any information surrounding this issue would be much apprecited. Thanks Gary
Algorithm Updates | | GaryVictory0 -
Should you include Website Title in all page title tags?
We recently spent analyzing some of the best SEO software companies on the U.S. market fishing for the best practices in SEO and I saw one thing in common : They all had website titles in all the page title tags separated by " | " Is that the best practice for SEO or is it just for Branding? Interestingly enough, the website titles were completely unrelated to the pages' content or keywords. (Here's my personal opinion on what it looked like: "riding on a bicycle" | Ferrari ) But when I looked up the keywords ... ranked #1 or #2 spots, in some serious competition. (So in the example above, "bicycle" would be in the top spot)
Algorithm Updates | | HMCOE0 -
Video SEO: Youtube, Vimeo PRO, Wistia, Longtail BOTR Experience and questions
Obviously Video SEO is changing, Google is figuring out how to do it themselves. We are left wondering… Below we have tried to explain what we have learned and how the different sites work and their characteristics (links to graphics provided) Our problem is: We are not getting congruent Google site:apalytics.tv Video filter results. We are wondering how duplicate content may be affecting our results… and if so, why will Youtube not be duplicate and prevent your own site SEO efforts from working. Is Youtube special? Does that include Vimeo too? We see our own duplicate videos on multiple sites in Google results, so it seems it is not duplicate related…? We’d appreciate your experience or add to our questions and work as a community to get this figured out more definitively. Thanks! We’ve tried four video hosting solutions at quite a cost monetarily and in time. 1.) Youtube, which gets all the SEO Juice and gets our clients on to other subjects or potentially competitive content. Iframes just don’t get the results we are looking for. 2.) See Vimeo Image: Vimeo PRO, a $200 year plus solution that allows us to do many video carousels on our own domains hosted on Vimeo, but are very limited in HTML as only CSS content changes are allowed. While we were using Vimeo we allowed the Vimeo.com community to SEO our content directly and they come up often in search results. Due to duplicate content concerns we have disallowed Vimeo.com from using our content and SEOing our content to their domain. However, we have many “portfolios” (micro limited carousal sites on our domains) that continue to carry the content. The Vimeo hosted micro site shows only three videos on Google: site:apalytics.tv During our testing we are concerned that duplicate content is causing issues too, so we are getting ready to shut off the many microsite domains hosted at Vimeo. (Vimeo has an old embed code that allows a NON-iframe embed – but has discontinued it recently) That makes it difficult if not impossible to retain SEO juice for anything other than their simple micro sites that are very limited! 3.) See Wistia Image: Wistia, a $2000 year plus solution that only provides private video site hosting embedding various types of video content on one’s site/s. Wistia has a free account now for three videos and limited plays – it’s a nice interface for SEO but is still different than BOTR. We opted for BOTR because of many other advertising related options, but are again trying Wistia with the free version to see if we can figure out why our BOTR videos are not showing up as hoped. We know that Google does not promise to index and feature every video on a sitemap, but why some are there and others are not and when remains a mystery that we are hoping to get some answers about. 4.) See Longtail Image: Longtail, Bits On The Run, (JW Player author) a $1,000 year plus like Wistia provides private hosting, but it allows a one button YouTube upload for the same SEO meta data and content – isn’t that duplicate content? BOTR creates and submits video sitemaps for your content, but it has not been working for us and it has been impossible to get a definitive answer as I think they too are learning or are not wanting the expose their proprietary methods (which are not yet working for us!) 2O9w0.png 0eiPv.png O9bXV.png
Algorithm Updates | | Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.0 -
Site-wide Footer Link on Client/Friend Website - Dangerous?
Hi Guys, I've got a friend / client / business associate who's website I helped develop. It's a three letter dot-com, so good trust, and an eCommerce site, so lot's of pages. When I launched my new site about 6 weeks ago I put "Official IT Partner of MySite.com" in the footer. No keywords in the anchor text, just the domain URL... There are no other external links like that on the site whatsoever, and I haven't been hit by Penguin. I'm ranking well for local targeted keywords a few weeks after launch, and traffic continues to increase... I am worried that Google will see this is unnatural, but I've received no warning or experienced any decline in rankings. There's about 2800 pages linking from the site to my site, all in the footer of course. Would it be better to remove the link from the footer and add it just to the home page and a couple of other high authority pages, or should I leave it be. It's not "unnatural", I am affiliated with the site and work in partnership with the site, but it does fit that profile. I'm thinking about removing the footer link and adding a small graphic on the home page of the linking site which links to my root domain, with a couple of broad keyword anchored links in a description underneath that also link to relevant pages on my site... What do you think? 2800 links w/ my URL as anchor text from high Domain Authority / Low Page Authority pages (the homepage and a few other pages have decent authority) to my root domain OR Three different links from one High DA/ High PA homepage (one image alt, two anchored w/ broad keywords) to three different pages on my site. Again, there are no other site-wide external links on the domain, and I'm pretty sure I escaped the Penguin. Looking forward to hearing the different points of view. Thanks, Anthony
Algorithm Updates | | Anthony_NorthSEO2 -
What is considered duplicate content in an ecommerce website that offers the same product for retail and wholesale purchasing?
I have an ecommerce website that offers retail and wholesale products which are identical, of course with the exception of pricing. My concern is duplicate content. If the same product is offered under both the retail and wholesale category, and described identically, with the exception of price, metadata and a few words, is that considered duplicate content and would both pages be disregarded by the robots? Is it best to avoid the same description for that one product under the two separate categories? Thanks for all your help!
Algorithm Updates | | flaca0