VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

Dude, where’s my video?

“A bread machine. We gave him a bread machine for his birthday. Him and his wife have no time to buy fresh bread every day, so it’s perfect for them.”

As my father-in-law was saying these words on a beautiful Sunday morning, a thousand questions were going through my mind. How is that possible (making bread at home)? How does it work? How long does it take. How big is this thing? Do you need to know anything about cooking? etc etc. So then I started by quest for answers. What is a bread machine??

Naturally, the process starts with a Google Search for “bread machine”. Lots of results, let’s pick the target.com link. There on Target, multiple choices - each of these machines features 4 or 5 product photos, a short product description that’s not really explaining how things work.

Most valuable are user reviews - but they all talk about how great or bad the product is, but do not provide answers to common sense questions. Dude, where’s my video? Isn’t this the perfect example of an innovative product that needs a little more context than a bunch of photos, copy and some text reviews?

I visited a few other sites and could not find any videos. Perhaps refining my Google query would help, let’s try “Bread machine video”. MUCH better.

The first link is to YouTube, there you can find all the information I was looking for. Look at the quality of the playlist on the right side of the YouTube page:

Found all the info I needed… on YouTube. A few thoughts on this experience:

1) YouTube 1- eRetailers 0. I would have expected the major retail sites to feature product videos, since most of this content is created by manufacturers or content sites like cooking.com. Why is this content only on YouTube? Does not make any sense to have it so far away from the purchase point.

2) Who said you should not syndicate content to YouTube? Users are being educated to find the videos they are looking for on YouTube by Google. Take a look at how Google is pushing links to YouTube videos. Also see how good a job YouTube does putting these all into a nice playlist.

3) Why do I need to append my initial query with “video” to start seeing videos in the Google SERP? This is a challenge to all the theories stating that video gives a huge boost to pages with video in search engine rankings. The videos exist, but you have to type exactly the right query to see them.

Refreshing key factors of video SEO strategy

I have just disconnected from my first live webinar on video SEO strategy, organized by ReelSEO, Truveo and Ooyala. The experience itself was good, I connected through a site called Go2Webinar to follow the presentation; I started Skype, dialed a number and entered my personal code. Image was ok, sound was fine. So that’s for the webinar experience.

The content itself was a bit commercial (especially the Ooyala part) but nevertheless there were interesting points worth sharing with you:

1. Video search engines and general search engines work differently.

2. 85% of all video search traffic goes through YouTube. So if you like it or not, think if you can affort not to be there. If you compete there, consider that YouTube values the following ranking factors:

• Views, ratings, shares, comments, suscribers, embeds and inbound links. The community factor counts, so make sure you also suscribe to other relevant users.
• Consider manual upload (vs. API upload) because it allows you to take full advantage of the text fields.

3. Create optimized video landing pages: Make sure every video has its own page and above all its own URL.

4. Avoid Javascript, it won’t get indexed.

5. Minimal page load times are super important for the user experience.

6. Spend time to optimize meta data, that’s the text that describes the content of your video: title, general description, tags, brand name, close captures or even an entire transcription of the video content.

7. Try to get videos into search engines, don’t wait for them to crawl for your content. Reel SEO recommends MRSS feeds and XML sitemaps.

8. Choose eye-catching and relevant thumbnails: the right thumbnail is important; make sure you include a relevant and appropriate representation of your video content. They are key to trigger the “click-to-play”.