SEO plays a vital role in your video business.
Being able to get traffic from search engines, and generate leads from people actively looking for a service like yours is a basic marketing strategy you can’t afford to overlook.
But, you know…
SEO also isn’t that fun to do.
It can be confusing, technical and hard to keep up with.
Because of this, we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure your Uscreen website is super SEO-friendly; so you can spend more time on the elements of your business that you love.
With our latest rollout of Uscreen video website templates, we’ve made it so that you only need to perform the basics of on-page SEO, and the theme will take care of the rest.
Our new website templates are all designed in-house to specifically cater to video content consumers. We designed it based on behavioral data of over 1 million users of the video streaming services hosted on Uscreen.
In this article, we’re going to show you the headache-free way to optimize your website’s homepage and get you ready to attract and convert search engine users.
Your Homepage: Where SEO And Sales Happen
Your homepage is the most important page on your website. Why?
Because it has two critical jobs:
- Ranking: it needs to show up for the correct keywords in search engines
- Converting: it needs to convert website visitors into paying customers
To do these jobs effectively, your homepage needs to be both user-friendly and fast.
Google won’t rank your website highly if the information is hard to find and its pages are slow to load. As SEO blogger Matthew Woodward found, having a slow, clunky website cost him just over $30,000 in annual revenue.
Visitors to your website will also quickly leave if they feel your website is clunky, hard to use, and takes more than a few seconds to load; 47% of web users expect a website to load in two seconds or less!
Which brings us, squarely, to your website…
One of the major mistakes Uscreeners make is trying to cram too much information into their homepage.
They try to create a Netflix-style homepage, which showcases all of their videos. You know, the screen that looks like this:
And, trust us, we get why. The Netflix style theme is pretty damn cool.
But this style is also heavy on images and short on information, which makes it slow to load and even worse at converting. (It shows you have a vast video library and nothing else.)
There is little space for the keywords or high-converting sales copy that your homepage needs to perform efficiently.
That’s why Netflix themselves don’t use that style on their homepage, either. Instead, they use this:
At $4 billion in yearly earnings, this has to be one of the best-converting sales pages in history, right?
Although, we do recommend you use a slightly more robust homepage for your website, which enables you to give greater insights into who you are and what you do, like Wanderlust TV:
The combination of images and text on your homepage give you an excellent opportunity to attract search engine traffic and generate leads. Meaning, more traffic and paying subscribers.
Okay, so that’s why your homepage is important and its key roles in your video business.
In the next section, we’ll look at how you can implement SEO basics on your homepage, and some of the best practices to follow, to ensure your site is ready.
3 Quick-And-Easy Ways To Improve Your VOD Website’s SEO
1. Reduce Your Image Size
The most common culprit behind a slow website is images that are too large in file size.
Large images are slow to load and can even stop a website from loading entirely if a user’s connection is poor.
The best way to deal with this is to reduce the quality and file size of your images to a point where they still look good but require less to load them.
We find the sweet spot for an image is around 80% of its original quality. This simple change results in a massive reduction in file size but is almost imperceptible to website users.
SIRV, an image hosting website, created the comparison below to illustrate what we mean. The image on the left is 92% quality and the one on the right 85%:
The file size (bottom right of the image) is drastically different, but the quality of the image is barely noticeable. A further reduction to 80% would bring about even further gains.
We also recommend saving all images as JPEG and not PNG files, which will further reduce the file size without making a noticeable difference to the image quality.
You can make these changes using a free tool like Compress Images from Toolur, before uploading them to your website.
Aim to do this for all images on your website, including:
- Banner images
- Video hero images
- Video thumbnails
You can find more information on the images your website has (or should have) right here.
2. Reduce The Number Of Images
While we’re on the topic of images…
Reducing the number of images on your homepage can also result in huge gains in website speed.
Your homepage doesn’t need a lot of images to showcase your business. Instead, you will see much better results – in both SEO and sales – from a few well-picked hero images and thumbnails.
We recommend you limit yourself to one hero image at the top of your page (or a carousel which changes every few seconds) and four to eight thumbnails of your videos, like this example here:
3. Add SEO Titles And Descriptions
Every Uscreen theme comes with the option to add SEO titles and descriptions.
Inside the “advanced tab” in your theme editor, there’s a little tool called “SEO Settings” where you can add the information you want Google to read and use to index your page to its database.
It’s just a simple headline and box, but it can have a powerful influence on your SEO:
Including this information is paramount if you want to show up in search engines, as it’s a key part of the data Google will extract to identify your website.
If you’re not sure how this looks in real-world terms, it’s this bit in Google:
Within this section you need to include a:
-
- Keyword-based, accurate title for your page. For your homepage, this will be the name of your site, followed by a sentence with your target keyword.
- Summary of the page’s purpose. A quick breakdown of what a user will learn on your site, including your target keyword.
As you can see in the Uscreen search result above, we’ve included the keywords we want to focus on, like:
- Sell videos online
- Video on demand
- VOD platform
Which are all relevant to our business and service we provide, but still sound natural when a search engine user comes across them. You can learn more about SEO and how to optimize your website for search engines, check out the Website and SEO section of Video Business School.
That’s all folks!
We hope by now you’ve got a much clearer idea of how to perform the basics of SEO on your Uscreen website.
Your website template is SEO friendly but does need a little optimizing form you to ensure you’re attracting the right kind of leads and traffic.
As long as you optimize your images, reduce the clutter on your homepage, and update your in-template SEO settings, you’ll set a great foundation for your sites search engine performance, and eventual conversions.
