If you run an independent eCommerce website – or, in fact, any website at all – then you probably know about sitemaps. A sitemap is essentially a page that details the pages and files of your website and sets out the relationships between them. It is in the name really – a sitemap is a map of your site, to aid those who wish to navigate it more effectively. The only thing is that sitemaps are designed primarily for search engines, allowing them to “crawl” your site more effectively, gain information regarding its content, and therefore allow the content of your site to be more easily found through search engines. Sitemaps are essential for website SEO, and how easily visitors can find your site through search engines like Google.
WMV Productions, a video production service specializing in online marketing videos, say that if you are engaged at all in video marketing and want your videos to attract new visitors to your site more effectively, it is an incredibly good idea to create a video sitemap. For online businesses engaging in video marketing, a video site map will allow the videos of your site to be more easily interpreted by search engines, meaning that each marketing video will more easily appear on Google searches. But what is a video sitemap and how is it different from an ordinary website sitemap?
Table of Contents
What is a Video Sitemap?
A video sitemap takes the essential concept of the sitemap a bit further. Whereas an ordinary sitemap will allow search engines to interpret the content of your site and the linkage between each individual page, a video sitemap allows your video content to be similarly interpreted by search engines.
What this means in practice is that the video content of your website will appear more easily on Google searches – or that your website videos will pop up on Google Videos. The benefits of this for video marketing are obvious as it allows you to see the biggest marketing potential from the marketing videos you have made and hosted on your site.
The Twin Functions of Marketing Videos
If you make marketing videos and then host them on your website, they essentially fulfill two basic functions. The first is to inform and entertain visitors to your site with marketing videos that explain more fully your product or other aspects of the site itself. In other words, marketing videos are posted on websites in order to catch the eye of visitors and keep them there. They exist therefore to improve the visitor experience and indirectly boost customer loyalty (in the case of eCommerce websites).
But the other function of marketing videos is to attract users to the site. This is achieved partly by spreading the videos far and wide, normally on social media platforms. Nevertheless, with a video site map, videos that are only posted on your site can also fulfill this function because a video site map ensures they will appear on Google Videos and on other search engines. This means that even though the video is only posted on your site, it can be seen by people who are not currently visiting the site. This could therefore attract those people to the site.
Last Word
In the end, this is the value of a video site map – it allows the videos you post on your website to be spread further afield. This allows them to act as one means of drawing traffic to your site, as well as a means of keeping visitors there once they arrive.