Many retailers hope to significantly boost their product page PageRank by adding video to it - betting on the fact that Google favors pages with video embedded in their search algorithm. I have seen anecdotal evidence that it is indeed true - although no one has published a repeatable formula yet, SEO after all is more art than science.

Another common practice for retailers and manufacturers is to publish their videos to YouTube. If you ask around what is driving these marketers to share on YouTube, you’ll likely hear that a) YouTube is the second most popular search engine, b) It’s potentially a lot of traffic, and c) it doesn’t cost anything (free advertising).

On the flip side I have been hearing more and more recently about “product page SEO concerns” - when a video is published to both the product page, and to YouTube. The argument usually goes like this - “I’ve read somewhere that Google favors video by inflating PageRank, resulting in up to a 50x boost in search engine visibility” (whatever that means). “So if I put my video on YouTube, the risk of the YouTube outranking my own product page is high - bumping my position on the SERP down. That’s why we stopped pushing videos to YouTube”.

The cannibalization story is certainly believable and the explanation makes sense if indeed Google has some bias to artificially inflate the PageRank of pages with video. At the same time, I have observed that the most successful retailers with video usually have a very
aggressive YouTube strategy, where every piece of content is pushed to YouTube, without evidence of SEO cannibalization. In fact, the perception among these successful retailers is that YouTube provided an extra SEO boost - and here is why.

1) YouTube is a massive backlink magnet, because so many sites, blogs, articles point it. Its PageRank is high - but more important, since YouTube appends any outbound link with rel=”nofollow”, the PageRank credit of a YouTube page is only spread across other YouTube pages. It’s like an echo chamber.

2) If a YouTube page is linked from a site with a high PageRank, it’ll benefit not only that page, but any related videos that are linked from it. In other words, the related videos on YouTube get a “free PageRank credit”.

3) As a retailer, if your videos appear as related to popular videos, they might start showing high on a SERP because their PageRank is high.

4) High PageRank means more visibility on Google, which may result in third part sites finding and linking to the retail site, sometimes directly to the product page.

With this hypothesis there isn’t a cannibalization risk, because when the retailer pushes a product video to YouTube it is not at the expense of the product page, rather, it earns free credit from YouTube. Perhaps a more appropriate term to understand what is really happening would be “incremental free SEO” from YouTube.

In essence publishing e-commerce videos to YouTube in addition to the adequate product page is something I would consider a must. Important also would be to properly tag the video in YouTube and append a good description, since the key to success is to appear as often as possible as a related video in YouTube.

By now everyone knows that HTML5 will have a video tag built into it allowing you to place video online without the need for an external player. But our friends at ReelSEO have scored a major win and put together two major powers in the online video player arena, Jeroen “JW” Wijering and the Opera browser’s HTML5 video core developer, Philip Jagenstedt. It’s happening next week, July 21st at 11am Pacific.

There you will have a chance to ask questions about the various html5 video codecs (webM, Ogg, H.264), browsers that support HTML5, advantages, disadvantages, the future of HTML5 video, and more.

Register Now for this FREE webinar

If you still think that you can use TV commercials on your product pages, watch this old video of Steve Ballmer making a pitch for Windows 1.0 on TV (a while back obviously). Granted, this is an old, corny, funny video - and probably a bad example for a broader observation - don’t design your product videos like TV commercials.

Now enjoy.

A few days ago I dropped my iPhone 3GS getting off my car. Just slipped away from my pocket and… woozah. The screen was totally cracked. Luckily I had some tape around to to wrap the thing, and surprisingly, still use it. Now a few days have passed and a friend of mine told me you can get it fixed for about $60. Another one said to look for a screen repair kit for about half the price. That’s when things get interesting.

Can I do this myself? Amazon has this repair kit at $15-20 with fairly good customer ratings. But it’s hard to tell how easy or hard it is to perform the repair. A video would be great. So I keep searching.

Then I find this site, which puts it all in one page - the actual replacement glass, as well as each of the tools you need to execute the screen change yourself. But most important, a video, because I want to know before buying if I can do this myself.

The video is a little slow to start but you get the idea pretty quick. You need tools, you need to be ultra careful, and you need a ton of time. Probably the most discouraging experience I’ve ever had - I just cannot do this. And video persuaded me NOT to buy a product.

If we take a step back, perhaps the most interesting question is “Should a video bringing down conversion rates for a product be taken offline?“. The simple answer is YES, for the obvious reasons. Imagine yourself walking into a meeting where your boss asks you “how’s product X doing in conversions”, and you reply “not well since we added the video”. Not the best scenario.

But if the video is well executed, it probably is worth discouraging non-qualified buyers who will inevitably fail trying to repair their iPhone themselves. Failing costs money (returns) and future sales (negative marketing) - success on the other hand is contagious. That’s how I heard about the kit in the first place.

“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.

Now that the dust has settled a bit around the issue of Apple not supporting Flash in its mobile products, the SEO community is starting to take a closer look at the benefits of using HTML5 as the delivery method for video. In the last 4 to 6 weeks, I’ve seen a surge in interest for HTML5 video, and not because it’s the only way to play video in an iPad. There seems to be a belief out there that HTML5 is a better way to expose video to search engines - specifically product videos in the case of retailers.

Perhaps the urge to investigate HTML5 comes from the realization that Flash is not the most SEO friendly delivery mechanism for video. We’ve all heard Google can in some cases recognize video wrapped in Flash, but there’s never been any evidence of that being the case. Not to mention that in 99% of the cases on e-commerce sites, Flash video is itself wrapped around a popular JavaScript library called SWFObject for a better user experience and graceful degradation. Not terribly SEO-friendly.

On the other hand HTML5 video tag appears to be built for video SEO, just like the regular HTML image tag is the canonical way to expose images to both users and search engines. Consider the simplicity of this HTML5 video tag:

<video src=”/myvideofolder/videofile.mp4″ controls=”controls”></video>

In which the video source file is directly exposed and easily findable like crawlers, just like images:

<img src=”/myimagefolder/imagefile.jpg”/>

If Google Images offers any indication of how HTML5 video could be indexed in the future, then it is expected that the video source URL itself will play an important role. Video files with URLs like “/running-shoes/new-balance.mp4″ will do better than others like “/myvideos/877732.mp4″. But that’s only one of the dozens of new tricks I expect will emerge in the next 18-months - in what could constitute a small revolution int he SEO world.

Despite the general economic slowdown, the global wine market is growing. Every year more people drink more wine and they start to spend more on each bottle. It is estimated that the global wine market is worth some 240 Billion USD, with the US being the biggest consumer market.  France comes second.  China is growing more quickly than any other country (in 2008, China generated total revenues of $5.8 Billion). In terms of production, more than 60% of all wine is still made in Europe; with France, Italy and Spain as the leading wine producers.

Although wine distribution, marketing and communication varies A LOT from country to country and consumer behavior is often driven by social and cultural factors, there is one common trend: the Internet has become central to marketing and selling wine as online sales grow. A study by the Bordeaux Management School in France found online wine sales grew 30% in the last year alone in that country.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find reliable numbers on how much wine is sold online every year overall, but since France alone saw a 30% increase in web sales from 2008 to 2009, the overall volume seems important enough to dedicate some thoughts on the future relevance of video for online wine retailing.

I looked at some of the most important online wine retailers to see if and how they use video in their online strategy and found the outcome disappointing. Video marketing is still a rare discipline in the online wine retailing business it seems although there are a couple of extraordinary success stories, like Gary Vaynerchuk’s WineLibrary.tv or the German wine shop TVino.de

Gary Vaynerchuk, one of Internet’s hottest retail celebrities has created a business of $70 million based partly on the success of his daily video wine-tasting show at WineLibrary.TV. Wine entrepreneur and social media star, he is an early adopter of online video marketing. He published more than 840 episodes, presenting 3 different wines every day for almost 3 years. Vaynerchuk has perfectly understood the value and the power of online video in order to create a brand and broaden his potential customer base to ultimately sell his products over the Internet. But most of all he has shown a great understanding for what drives online buying processes in general and decision making when it comes to wine and wine-related products in particular.

Think about it for a moment: wine is just not like any other product you shop for off or online. It is not a standard product. There are millions of different producers and brands and quality can differ from year to year depending where it comes from. So, wine is a typical “prescription” product. Most likely, you would rather listen to an expert, a vendor, a waiter or a wine-literate friend than risk 20 Euros just because you like the label. Generally speaking and for most people, wine shopping is a rather sensual experience. You want to touch the bottle, feel the label, see the color, get some expert advise on what to eat with it and most of all you want to know how it tastes before you buy it. So either you are lucky enough to taste the wine yourself before you decide or you need somebody knowledgeable to describe the taste to you.

As more expensive wines became mainstream consumer goods, sharing wine knowledge also became a vehicle for communicating social status.  In addition, being able to select a decent wine has required specialized knowledge. Consumers that know about wine represent a broader consumer group called called “the professional consumer.”  Professional consumers are people who actually want to know stuff about the product they are consuming.  They want to learn about it - especially when it comes to food and its origin - and then they want to share that knowledge within their social network.

Video content in the form of wine-tasting shows -check out the examples of WineLibrary, TVino (Germany), Majestic Wine (UK) or Wein&Co (Austria)- have great potential as they provide marketing and communication elements so crucial to the online decison making process.

Watching an entertaining and informative 5 minute video that compares 3 different Riojas, Chardonnays or Pinot Noirs can be a much more interesting experience than shopping for wine in the aisles of a supermarket. Getting an expert description of taste and comparing prices before actually ordering a case is an extremely useful and user-friendly decision making tool for online shoppers. Also, these kind of videos are relatively easy and low cost to produce since merchants don’t need complicated settings or sophisticated post-production. All that’s needed is a credible presenter or host who connects with the audience, a camera operator, and a video editor.  In many cases that can be one person.

Wine online retailers who use good video content and wine-tasting shows will have a competitive advantage compared to text-based shops since they offer entertainment and education, something that many wine shoppers are actually looking for.

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”.

Video works for e-retailers. In 2010, we already know that landing pages and product sites with video convert better than those without. But the mayority of thoses sites follow a simple presentation formula: product pages including a (more or less sophisticated) video player that reproduces relevant content about the product in question.

In the service sector (banking, education, telecoms, etc.) we are starting to see different techniques of integrating video, with navigation concepts entirely based on and around video content. That means that the core elements of the site’s architecture is audiovisual content and animation (mostly in flash) that cover most part of the page but without using the “standard click-to-play video player” we are used to from video sharing sites or most of the e-retailer product pages.

Let’s see a first good example from the banking sector: Chase Blueprint, a personal financial tracking&tracing service offered to Chase clients.

Kaplan Academy of California also uses video hosts that cover more than 50% of the homepage to help different target users to navigate through the site.

AT&T’s video host explains the advantages of the 3G MicroCell wifi modem right from the living room. The format chosen is a kind of video catalogue that guides the user through the product’s features and advantages.

In my opinion, these sort of video integration makes special sense for home and landing pages. Videos become a “natural” part of the online navigation and it is an effective way to focuses the user’s attention to the main features on the site, simplifying the navigation and reducing the number of clicks to get to key contents.

Nevertheless, there are a few important things to consider using videos that don’t come in standard players.

1) Costs: production costs for these videos are likely to be higher. To look great they need to be shot in a studio, with perfect lightening, a croma key or an infinite white box; it also requires a professional postproduction to combine the human presenters with the rest of the elements and the animation.

2) Autoplay or press to play? Don’t forget that the user needs to be in control of the reproduction; that includes a play, stop and a sound-off option; one option is to autoplay the video when the user first comes to the page and make it “press-to-play” when the user returns.
3) Include triggers. Make sure the user knows how and where to start the video. Be as direct as possible and avoid a simple “play video”; try to reveal what’s behind the content; scroll up to the Kaplan example and you will know what I mean.

4) Don’t forget your Call To Action.
Set up Blueprint (example Chase), Request more information (example Kaplan) , Availability Checker (example AT&T) are effective examples to include Calls For Action. If the goal of the video is to convert, the clip needs persuasive Calls For Action, clearly visible throughout the running time of the clip.

Part 2 of what I think will be happening in the field of video marketing in 2010.

6. Live streaming and live video presentations online.

• Live streaming of company’s events and online product launches will become part of digital marketing and communication strategies.

7. Video SEM and SEO will become relevant disciplines.

• This year marketers will discover the relevance of video SEM and SEO as part of their overall strategy since video contents helps to get better page rankings results.

8.  Evolution of video user experience.

• We will see an evolution of what we called “player”, video content will be integrated naturally into websites, optimizing navigation and user experience. (PD: check out my next post here).

9. Widgets, widgets, widgets.

• Widgets will help make video content more attractive for e-retailers, helping to push conversion rates. Check out the tools offered by Qoof (just to name one) for example.

10. Video and mobile marketing.

• Although a few weeks ago I predicted that the 2010 won’t be the year of mobile video commerce - mainly due to technical problems and the lack of generally adopted mobile payment platforms - I think we will talk a lot about it and hopefully see some leaps forward. Especially now that Google (= YouTube, which is converting into a video based transactional shopping site) has its own device and many programmers waiting to create apps for the Android platform.