It’s official. Online video marketing is no longer a benefit – it’s a necessity.

If you want to bolster brand recognition, drive targeted traffic to your site and increase conversions without spending tons of time and money, viral videos are the way to do it. Search Engine Land offers some helpful insight into this topic in their recent post on why “Video Is Now a Must-Have Feature for Competitive SEO.”

In today’s society, our mindset is largely focused on two factors: instant gratification and entertainment value. People surfing the Web want to find information quickly and easily, and they want it to be provided in an engaging way.  Viral videos allow you to do both. In a short two minute video you can convey an entire page of information, and you can do it using cool graphics, funny clips and other attention grabbing tactics.

You can also use viral videos to drive targeted traffic to your site. People are much more likely to watch a “How to” video than read an article on the same topic, so by providing the specific information users are looking for, you can direct them to your website at the exact time they need your products or services.

So how exactly do viral videos boost SEO? It’s easy. When you embed a video on a page and it includes the keywords that page is targeting, it can help increase that page’s rankings. In addition, when that video shows up in video-specific searches, it’s going to be bolstered by the keywords on the page where it’s located. Relevancy and placement are key, because when the content of a video and the text on a page reinforce each other, they provide double the SEO power. In addition, because videos are generally more compelling than text, people are more likely to click on them when they show up in search results in conjunction with a page on your website.

Viral videos are ideal conversion boosters, because they can:

•    Deliver compelling calls to action
•    Present content in an interesting and engaging way
•    Grab viewers’ attention and provide entertainment value
•    Promote events, features and new products in unique ways
•    Guide users through complex procedures
•    Bring your website to life

Online videos don’t have to be complex, so it can be fairly inexpensive to create these compelling marketing tools. In addition, it’s easy to get instant feedback on how effective your videos are. Simple analytics can show you how many times a video has been viewed, how many times it has resulted in a click-through or conversion and how users are responding to it.

The popularity of video portals has skyrocketed in recent years, and with their close ties to social media, they’re bound to become even more popular in the future.  It’s not uncommon for videos on YouTube to have hundreds of thousands of views, so if your company isn’t utilizing this important form of marketing you may be throwing valuable leads out the window.

Learn more about how online video marketing can benefit your business today.

*Photo provided by limaoscarjuliet on Flickr