Embed hosted videos or Youtube videos on site
-
Youtube is our major source of traffic.
We also have many of the same videos on our own site, self-hosted. They use the same video player as our paid video course, which allows the user to increase or decrease speed.
We're debating whether to replace these self-hosted videos with youtube embeds.
Pros:
- Increase Youtube viewcounts
- More engagement with videos (videos suggested at end of youtube videos are almost all our own)
Cons
- Possible outbound traffic to youtube.
- We can't showcase our video player's speed change function
I'm not sure how embed views are taken into account by Youtube, and how big a factor outbound traffic is. Would you suggest swapping out our self-hosted videos for embeds?
We want to maintain our Youtube channel's edge, and convince people to sign up for our course.
-
If you just want the videos watched - Host the YouTube versions, but bear in mind that you'll be sacrificing rankings to your own site as a consequence.
Additionally consider that View Counts don't actually effective YouTube video's ranking position much. More important to improve visibility on YouTube.com is the user engagement (how many peopel watch the video through to the end and then thumb/comment/share it).
-
With all respect, that article is completely misleading.
While YouTube videos will almost always get indexed on your site, it does not then follow that your site is the one that ranks for them. 99 times out of 100, YouTube will outrank your site with the rich snippet.
-
We have the videos on Youtube right now as part of our marketing strategy. Currently, Youtube traffic is a large percentage of our referrals. We wouldn't take those videos down, even if we keep the self hosted embeds.
Does that change your answer? Our PageRank is pretty low, so I'm not sure we could outrank our competitors' Youtube videos even if we took down our own and set up a proper video sitemap.
Thanks
-
If you properly code a video you host yourself on your website, you have a chance for your page to rank for that video with a thumbnail in the search results as well, giving it a better CTR than a standard link.
If you host the video on youtube, then youtube will always out rank your site, so you're sending more traffic to youtube instead of to your sites page which will convert hopefully.
Webmasters spend time and money setting up a player on their site just for this reason. If you haven't generated video image thumbnails and submitted video sitemap.xml files you haven't done what you need to do in order to see the effectiveness that hosting videos on your own platform could bring.
-
I don't see why not, if the SERP display is the same, then it should have the same chance of increasing your click through.
I would say that would be a great test. Try a few videos using embedded youtube - so you can get more views (as you stated is desired) and a few self hosted. See if you can get them both to get an enhanced SERP display and watch the traffic.
-
That's a good point. We don't currently have a video sitemap, but we could set one up.
I did see this article that suggests Youtube embeds can now achieve the same effect. Do you know if they can be made just as effective?
-
One of the things you'll hear Rand stressing lately is how enhanced your SERP result is for your site. I believe that by self hosting and properly optimizing (video sitemap and related content) you could see higher click through for pages which get a video snippet in the SERP. You take up more real estate in the results and draw the users eye in. This could get you higher CTR and in the end more video views.
-
Hmm...the main action we want people to take on the page is to watch the video. The main effect of embedding them would be to boost our view counts. But I've heard embeds don't translate 1-to-1 into increased views, and I know a lot of companies (such as SEOmoz) self-host rather than embed.
I presume there is a reason.
What kind of CTA did you have in mind? I'm not sure what question it would solve.
-
How about adding a cta (call to action) next to your embedded video and then doing A/B split testing in Google Analytics Experiments?
Serve 2-3 versions of the same URL to your visitors, track everything in GA Experiments and then you'll get an idea which solution is better for your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is my site being penalized?
I've gone through all the points on https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 but the site only ranks for its brand name after months. The website is not ranking in the top 100 for any main keywords (2,3,4 word phrases), only for a handful of very long phrases (4+). All of the content is unique, all pages are indexed, the website is fast and doesn't contain any crawl errors and there are a couple of links pointing to it. There is a sitewide follow link in the footer pointing to another domain, its parent company and vice-versa. This is not done for any SEO reasons but the companies are related and also the products are supplementary of each other. Could this be an issue? Or is my site being penalized by something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbern0 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Need your thoughts on my site
Hi, This is my site: http://hemorrhoidssuccess.com/ I have got some decent natural links with a mix of different anchor texts. My main keyword is "Hemorrhoids Treatment", And i got very less exact match anchor texts. Now i was able to rank for "Top Hemorrhoid Treatment" on #2 Page, but i was not in the index for the my main keyword "Hemorrhoids Treatment". Can you review my site and let me know, what i am missing? Do i need to get more links? If so with what anchor texts? Will be waiting for your replies.. Thanks in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitss
Dhee0 -
Site Transfer and Downtime
If I want to transfer my website from yahoo to another web host without having any down time how would I do that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Hosting Providers and SEO
I have been wondering for a while which web host provider is the best for SEO purposes? Things to consider. Shared Hosting vs Dedicated Server Location of the Host Provider Site Up Time One question that I have been thinking about is what impact would changing a host provider have on a websites serps ranking? Is there a possible negative impact and if so how can it be avoided? Name the top 3 Web Hosts for SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Why is Google Still Penalizing My Site?
We got hit pretty hard by Penguin. There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up and we also had a pretty unique situation stemming from about a year ago when we changed the name of the company and created a whole new site with similar content under a different URL. We used the same phone number and address, and left the old site up as it was still performing well. Google didn't care for that so we eventually used 301 redirects to push the link juice from the old site to the new site. That's the background, here's the problem...... We've partially recovered, but there are several keywords that haven't come back anywhere near where they were in Google. We have higher page rank and more links than our competition and are performing in the top 5 for some of our keywords. Other, similar keywords, where we used to be in the top 5, we are now down on page 4 or 5. Our website is www.hudsoncabinetrydesign.com. We build custom cabinetry and furniture in Westchester County, NY just north of NYC. Examples - For "custom built-ins new york" we are number 3 on Google, number 1 on Bing/Yahoo. For "custom kitchen cabinetry ny" we are number 3 on Bing/Yahoo, not in the top 50 on Google. For "custom radiator covers ny" we used to be #1 on Google, are currently #48, currently #2 on Bing/Yahoo. Obviously, we've done something to upset the Google, but we've run out of ideas as to what it could be. Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks so much for your feedback, Doug B.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | doug_b0 -
Hosting images on multiple domains
I'm taking the following from http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html "Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org" What I want to do is load page images (it's an eCommerce site) from multiple sub domains to reduce load times. I'm assuming that this is perfectly OK to do - I cannot think of any reason that this wouldn't be a good tactic to go with. Does anyone know of (or can think of) a reason why taking this approach could be in any way detrimental. Cheers mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
Software to add subtitles to videos?
Hi, I work for a site that focuses on providing health information through videos. We would like to add French subtitles (because we're in Canada) so I'm looking into software that would allow us to add them to our videos. I have no experience with this sort of thing, so I'm wondering if anyone has any advice on the best type of software to use? Thanks! E
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erinhealthchoices0