Fliqz Launches Service to Drive Video Content to Top of Google Search
In his 1998 book, “Life, The Movie,” author Neal Gabler argued that entertainment conquered reality in U.S. culture during the second half of the Twentieth Century.
A little over a decade later, one might add that the “movie” most Americans choose to live their lives out in is a bad one, probably one made for TV*.
Like it or not, however, we live in an age dominated by television, which is one reason the big search engines award a very high ranking to search results that include any relevant video clips.
As we’ve noted here before, one sure way to improve your search results on Google (or Bing) is to embed video in your web page.
“The research we have seen indicates that 80 percent of the online audience will click on a video before reading the text,” says Benjamin Wayne, CEO of Fliqz, told me last August. Fliqz, which is based in Emeryville, CA, provides plug-and-play video solutions to some 35,000 website customers, including biggies like MLB.com and Web MD, down to Mom and Pop types.
I caught up with Wayne again this morning because Fliqz is launching a new service today, called “SearchSuccess,” that the company says is driving first-page Google rankings for its dozen beta partners who have been testing it during the pre-launch period.
“It’s become obvious that Google has prioritized video over all other forms of content, including text and images,” Wayne told me. “This reflects our television-centric world, but there are not a lot of videos, relatively speaking, in Google’s index yet. That is largely because Google cannot discover video on its own. So SearchSuccess was specifically designed to solve the problem of ‘how do you get a video to the top of Google search results page?’”
What the company provides is a little bit of “cut and paste” magic that you can use via Google’s “Webmaster Tools” to achieve that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that everyone is so desperately seeking.
It essentially maps the video in a way that makes it much easier for Google to discover it. An example can be seen for the search results on “social product development in action,” which yields video content for a Fliqz customer, Design World Online.
Wayne says that of 1,000 videos submitted via SearchSuccess recently by that company, almost 700 received first-page rankings on Google and over 200 attained the number one search result rank.
“For a long time, people have felt that video helps drive interest in your site, but it has been hard to quantify its actual value,” says Wayne. “Now, we have a tool that allows customers get noticed by Google and they can then measure the direct traffic to their sites.”
The service may be a bit pricey for small businesses, as it costs $250/month on top of the $499/month Gold Edition paid by Fliqz premium customers. But Wayne says this pricing compares favorably with the “tens of thousands of dollars” sites devote to the alternative, which is SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
* Disclosure: Decades ago, I briefly worked as a consultant in Hollywood helping to develop what was then called the “movie of the week.” I was not particularly successful in this endeavor.
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In addition to serving as a BNET Media analyst/blogger, David Weir is a veteran journalist and the author of several books. Weir is a co-founder and vice-president of the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as an editorial board member of The Nation.
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