A Video For A Roofing Contractor

When we were approached by Essex Roofer Wayne from WJ Roofing And Property Services to produce a video for the homepage of his Sudbury roofing company, we immediately stopped for pause. Not necessarily because we didn’t know how we would create such a video, but because we needed to decide what was best for the client. The reason that Wayne wanted a video was to embed the clip on the home page of his website and the reason for doing so was actually based upon some information that he discovered in one of our blog posts from last year which references the following statistics:

Google algorithms prioritise websites containing video content and 93% of all online experiences begin with search engines – primarily Google. Naturally, you want to do everything within your power to have your website appear on the first page, which is always high-competition and well-seasoned. The top three results on Google get 55% of all clicks!

Chances are that all the websites in the top 3, or even the top 10 will have video embedded into their website homepage – whether that is a lightbox player, or a direct upload. Adding videos to your website can increase your rankings on SERP’s (search engine results pages) in the following ways:

– Including video on your homepage drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from SERP’s, your click-through rates will see a drastic improvement! Clicks lead to calls and conversions. To put it simply, adding a video to your homepage will drive traffic, which will indirectly get you new customers.

– Video increases the amount of time that visitors spend on your website by at least two times the amount! This tells Google that your page is of high value and that it has meaningful content, which in turn will boost SERP rankings!

There are of course other ways that video will help with SERP rankings, as well as other things such as increasing reputability, providing you with a better brand image, explaining products or concepts in a simple and easier to digest manner (and more). Those are really the main two though. To increase the amount of time that people spend on your website, and to have less people leave the website.

How does this tie into producing a video for WJ Roofing And Property Services?

Well. The first stage to working with Wayne was to assess his goals and targets, to evaluate how much value the addition of a video would be to his business. We did this by calculating the average value of a transaction (if a new customer booked his services), and we then worked out how many new customers he would like and what the ROI (return on investment) would be. It was extremely lucrative for his company to invest into a video, however – we did not feel that it was beneficial to actually produce a live video when we could achieve the same results, at a fraction of the cost. Wayne’s objective was to increase traffic and reduce bounce rate, whilst climbing the SERP’s and converting leads into new customers. To do this, all he needed was a video of some kind to be embedded and that video didn’t need to be anything overly complex. It would simply be replacing a still image on the home page.

What we came up with was a video slideshow of some of the past roofs that Wayne had worked on and we very quickly, simply edited those into a short slideshow, of which we then exported in the format of a video, uploaded to YouTube, with relevant meta-tags links and description containing keywords for ranking. We then embedded that video onto his site. We made sure to compress the file so that it doesn’t cause the page to slow down at all (another important ranking factor).

Now that the video is on the website, we will continue to track the results with Wayne (we set up Google analytics) so we can monitor and evaluate the progress.

By working out the client goals and re-evaluating their requirements, we were able to save Wayne hundreds of pounds in filming rates and we simply charged for an hour of video editing and during that time we were able to embed the video and set up the page for optimization and monitoring.