So, you have a great click through rate on a video blog post, but the bounce rate is high. What happened?

Doing it wrong

Chances are, that your headline was great, but your video was the whole post. When you post a video on your blog with no other text, you are likely to lose a lot of visitors right away. Many people are catching up on your blog while they are at work, or otherwise unable to have video and audio playing at that moment. You alienate these visitors when you provide no text to accompany your video.

If you have decided that a video is the best way to share information on your topic, that is awesome! People do love videos, and YouTube or Vimeo can serve as great traffic sources for your blog. If someone is specifically seeking out a video, you will have what they are looking for. But if people simply want to know what content lies beyond your headline by skimming your text, you will lose them.

Doing it right

To get the best of both worlds: your readers and watchers – be sure you provide text along with your video. In my experience, the best format for a video post is:

1. An introduction – Introduce your video with a short paragraph of text about the topic you cover in the video, and why you feel it is important.
2. The video – Don’t make your visual people scroll for the goods. Embed your video right after your introduction.
3. Descriptive text or bullet points – Outline what you cover in the video. This is not a teaser – that was your introduction. This should actually give your readers a brief rundown of the main points of your video, and it should contain the takeaways that your viewers get, and your call to action. This is a substitute for watching your video. Remember, you usually only get one chance to grab your visitor’s attention. It’s unrealistic to think they’ll be back later to watch the video.

If you think text is a boring way to bookend a video post, consider this: search engines do not know what is contained in your video. If you want to have your post rank well and be found more easily by people searching for the topic you cover, you need that text!

So for the user and for the benefit of your traffic, please include text on your video posts and watch your bounce rate go down!