In 2020, video content is still king. Numerous marketing studies show that video content converts and engages audiences better than other formats. But, as more companies invest in video marketing, there’s a lot of missteps happening.
Video can do more harm than good on your website, if you make one of these common mistakes below.
5 Common Video Mistakes on Websites
1. Poor Quality Video
One of the worst mistakes is to place a low quality video in a prominent place on your website.
Video is all around us on YouTube, social media and advertisements. Because of this, web visitors have pretty high expectations of video content and what a quality video should look like.
A low quality video can create a poor impression of your business.
Video Quality Tips
- Invest in a high-quality stock video or video production for any videos on your home page or critical pages
- Assess the resolution, sound quality and visual elements, before adding a video.
- Avoid auto playing videos with sound. Most web browsers mute autoplay videos by default because the sound can be so annoying.
2. Irrelevant Content for Web Visitors
If the content of the video isn’t relevant to web visitors, then it will could cause confusion or serve as a distraction.
Placement is also very important. You could have the best high-quality video, but if you place it on the wrong website page, then visitors may find the content out of context.
Video Placement Tips
- Think about your different web visitors. Place the video on a website page where it will make sense to those visitors’ goals.
- When creating video content, always start with a planning phase and understand your audience.
3. Selecting the Wrong Embed Settings
Have you ever watched a video on a website and when it ends, you see strange video recommendations? Sadly, this is a very common mistake.
If you don’t review the embed settings for the video, you can have some embarrassing recommendations appear at the end of your company video.
How to Adjust YouTube Video Recommendations
YouTube recently removed the checkbox option in the embed generator where you could turn off YouTube video recommendations. But there is still a way to adjust the recommendations:
- When you copy the embed code from YouTube, add ?rel to the end of the video URL in the embed code before you paste the code on your site
- If you add this to the URL, YouTube will only recommend other videos in your company YouTube channel.
- Unfortunately, there’s no way to turn off recommendations entirely, but this solution will prevent embarrassing ones from showing up.
4. Too Long in Length
While video content is typically more engaging, longer videos can hurt engagement.
It is difficult to keep audiences engaged for even a few minutes.
Long videos in the top section of a home page can also cause problems with performance and distract rather than engage web visitors.
Video Length Best Practices
- A video in the top section of the home page should be edited to under 10 seconds and then played on a loop.
- A high-quality company overview or process video is typically 30 seconds to 1 minute, while video blogs can be longer at 2-3 minutes.
- When creating any video content, focus on the message and get this across in the most engaging way possible.
5. Incorrect Subtitles
Web visitors often watch videos with the sound turned off and captions turned on.
Having incorrect subtitles will diminish the quality of your video and can create an unprofessional impression. A common mistake is to not clean up the automatic captions, which often include misspellings, especially of people’s names.
How to Edit Captions on YouTube
- After uploading a video to YouTube or Vimeo, you can view the automatic captions.
- Edit the captions and clean up any mistakes and misspellings. It’s very easy to edit them and keep the caption in sync with the video.
- Publish the new captions. You can also download an .srt file of the captions and use this if you are uploading the video to Facebook or LinkedIn.
