A couple years ago Bruce Clay, one of the top SEO experts in the world, predicted  (to paraphrase) “in a couple of years, if you don’t have video content, you won’t rank (on the search engines).”

Well, it’s been a couple of years and it seems he wasn’t far off.

Now we’re hearing that in short order (I’ll skip the year prediction), 90% of the web will be video-based. Just search “video seo” and you’ll see what I mean.

Frankly, I don’t know what that means exactly. But it certainly implies the necessity for video content for starters.

Around the same time, all on my own, I started telling clients that the slick, expensive video ads they’re so accustomed to from TV are not the way to promote new business. In fact, the cost of such productions is what made the whole idea of video prohibitive to small and medium-sized businesses. My point, covered in more detail on other articles in this blog, was that it works fine for the Big Guys because we’re already familiar with their products and services and don’t really need to be sold on them particularly. Those flashy videos are just there to remind us that those Big Guys still exist and are still offering great stuff for you to buy.

But for the smaller guys, the guys that most of us never heard of (and the guys that want to be discovered), that same approach could be a distinct disadvantage.  Why?  Because it’s just “marketing hype”. “It’s just an actor reading a script”.

So my approach was more of a documentary approach using the real people who are themselves human and slightly imperfect; not slick and polished like a pro actor with perfect hair, posture, hand gestures and clever script.

Seems this too has panned out as an accurate prediction.  Now I’ve been seeing blog posts about “humanizing” business videos and “the documentary approach”.

The one thing I did learn from these blogs was something I must have known a couple of years ago but hadn’t put my finger on….YouTube changed everything.

Need I say more?