Which is More Effective in Driving Website Traffic?

YouTube has all but blown up – bringing previously unknown users to the forefront and essentially marketing themselves and creating their very own brand. For businesses, however, it’s important to understand the reach, efficacy and intention of videos when compared to wells-structured articles and blogs – to better understand how each of these facts of marketing could be influencing your website traffic.

Vlogging in Marketing

Vlogging is the endearing term we’ve come to use for the creation of short, often educational and lead-generating video’s, targeted at answering the questions possible clients may have – and creating a call to action for them to visit your website.

The biggest gap in creating vlogs and increasing traffic is the platform; many businesses opt to create YouTube channel and upload their weekly or monthly vlogs on there. The gap comes in, in that YouTube and your website are two entirely separate platforms, and users very rarely ever click through to your website.

That being said, there are ways to breach the YouTube / Website Gap.

While you upload your video onto YouTube – you need to ensure these 5 steps are followed each and every time:

1. Ensure you video is in the highest possible definition; when uploading, select the highest resolution as well. Nobody likes to watch a glitchy, low-res video!
2. Ensure your website is verified and you can link to it using CARDS. This will drive traffic to your website directly from YouTube.
3. Do not use annotations – YouTube no longer supports this format. If your aim is to drive viewers to related videos, make use of the END SCREEN feature to promote other videos.
4. Ensure you company logo is displayed throughout the video; this can be done by going to your channel, selecting “Channel” under Creator Studio, navigate to “Branding” and uploading your logo.
5. Tags, descriptions and headings; ensure all of these are present in each and every video – this is essentially the same as using ALT text, meta descriptions and tags in blogs.

Another tip on how to breach the YouTube / Website Gap is to upload the same video directly to your Facebook page – using the same descriptions and heading as you would in YouTube. This allows users to be exposed to your video without having to navigate away from your page.

Blogging in Marketing

Blogging is tenfold easier to setup and maintain when compared with Vlogging. There’s no need for equipment, an actor – or any video editing. Another great benefit is the level of easiness we can see when trying to rank for keywords on blogs.

When a blog is correctly structured, using H1 and H2 headers, a meta description, focus keywords and ALT text on images, we can pretty much ensure a rank or two from them.

Sharing is easy, keeping track of visits resulting from blogs and website traffic is even easier – and metrics make so much more sense.

What’s the downfall, though? One needs to constantly update content to keep it evergreen – but most importantly – were live in an age of instant gratification, If someone can find an answer in 30 seconds flat by viewing a YouTube video –why would they read your 2000 word article to get the same results?

A great idea is to “mirror” your vlogs with blogs. Write about every topic you vlogs on, and embed that video into your vlog. This will increase website traffic, allow for users who want to read the opportunity to do so – and also give those looking for quick answers their solution, too.,

While there is no definitive “better” method of marketing between these two systems, working hem together often yields the best results.