Support Videos- need Guidance
-
Hi,
We would like to start uploading videos for support on our soon to be launched support centre interface. We wanted to know if we should use Youtube or Vimeo for something like this. From an SEO standpoint which video streaming software is better? If these videos get linked on blogs etc which video platform would give us stronger SEO juice? Awaiting your inputs
-
Thanks, Phil, I'll go check those out, as soon as I put out a couple of fires.
-
Hi Sheldon,
I've written about this extensively, but there are definite concerns about YouTube outranking your content and it can happen irrespective of the number of views garnered. Raw views are not a ranking factor on YouTube - so virality is not the only instance of a YouTube video outranking the page it's embedded on. Imagine, for example, how Google should calculate which page should rank if the page is embedded across multiple sites all optimised for the same keyword.
Now..I'm not saying YouTube is never the appropriate hosting solution - far from it - but I am saying that the reasons you would choose self hosting preclude YouTube from being a viable alternative. YouTube should only be used where content is consciously created for the platform, in order to take advantage of the social visibility it offers.
For more information - first watch this video: http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled
then read the following posts:
http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube
http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy
http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo
I hope that helps clarify things.
-
Hi, Phil-
Your points are well taken. Certainly, a CDN will handle the BW concerns, if a site owner is prepared to go that route. The alternatives you mention will certainly work, too, with the added benefit of not having to content with a 5 second ad on the screen.
But I think your concerns regarding YouTube doing poorly doesn't really hold water. If you self-host, either via CDN or on Vimeo, you'll undoubtedly be promoting the video in some fashion, on and off-page. Presumably, you'd do the same if embedding a YT video. So I see no difference in terms of traffic generation. Perhaps if you're depending upon YT for your traffic, but really, how many people do that? As for YT outranking the content, I would say if that happens, the content probably either went viral or there wasn't any meaningful promotion of the webpage undertaken.
We did a hangout the beginning of July, and embedded the YT video on our website. Our page is in the #2 slot, while the YT version is on the bottom of page 2. Aside from a couple of social mentions, we did very little to promote our page. http://www.google.com.mx/?gws_rd=cr#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&ei=GJYGUtuzOuiqyAHr7IGIAQ&fp=7a8e48b9e5b6684f&hl=en&newwindow=1&pws=0&q=matt+siltala+on+infographics&sa=N&safe=off&start=10
Granted, the views it garnered are hardly noteworthy, so the example is far from definitive. But I'd wager that even if it had gotten 1,000+ views by now, we'd be able to easily outrank it. 30,000 might be a different story - 300,000 probably pretty tough.
My point is, while I accept that your options are good ones, and quite likely, are better in some circumstances, I think YouTube is still worth thinking about for some circumstances, too.
-
Hi Sheldon,
I'm afraid I completely disagree with your advice here. When i say "self hosting" this doesn't necessarily mean you have to host the content on your server - using a CDN will do the same job from an SEO perspective and not come with any of the bandwidth concerns.
However, if you don't want to self host, the alternative - as I mentioned - is to use a paid third party solution such as Vzaar, Wistia, Vimeo Pro, Brightcove, Ooyala etc... not YouTube
YouTube is essentially a social platform and can outrank you for your content if you're trying to drive traffic. Additionally, if you content isn't relevant for a YouTube audience - it'll do very poorly on the platform since the user engagements metrics will suggest that the content is substandard.
-
Phil makes a good point about holding your customers by self-hosting. I would say that it is something you should consider very carefully, though, as bandwidth issues could be a bear if your hosting isn't right for it. You need to consider the size and number of videos you'll be hosting, and the traffic they'll be receiving.
If self-hosting isn't the avenue you opt for right now, then I would recommend YouTube. They offer more traffic, as was mentioned, as well as decent tracking ability.
-
As the videos are support related, I assume that their basically to your product/service in some way. If your product is somewhat specific (e.g. a proprietry piece of software or unique product), then you actually want to make sure your videos are hosted securely on your site - so your users come to you specifically for support, rather than going to YouTube.com or Vimeo.com. If you use YouTube or Vimeo to host, they may outrank you for your own videos and you'll find very few users actively search for product support in YouTube or vimeo search.
This means either self hosting your videos, or using a secure third party provider. My personal preference of third party video hosting is Wistia (http://www.wistia.com) but there are loads of good ones out there.
The platform itself doesn't really affect SEO juice, but you will need to ensure anyone embedding the video on a blog also links back to your site as the embeds themselves won't directly pass PageRank.
I hope that's useful!
-
Vimeo is better if you want to avoid unnecessary ads. Both YouTube and vimeo has same effect on SEO, but you can get more views if you use Youtube.
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 anyone aware about a tool that can be used for tracking YouTube video ranking on SERP & YouTube?
I am looking for a tool that can track ranking position of a YouTube video on SERP and YouTube. An example would be, Suppose I have a video X. I want to know the position of the video for keywords A,B,C on SERP and YouTube. Do let me know your inputs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SameerBhatia0 -
Video Accessibility and SEO
How do you implement video meta data, closed captioning and transcripts to ensure both search engines and screen readers can crawl/read? For example, in a mostly text-based video with a simple audio track hosted one brightcove and embedded into our site, we want to make sure 1) google can crawl the text on the video and 2) a vision-impaired viewer would be able to use a screen reader to hear the text on the video.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elmorse1 -
Do I need to remove pages that don't get any traffic from the index?
Hi, Do I need to remove pages that don't get any traffic from the index? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Need help understanding "Clone sites"
I just read an article about Panda and it warned against against Clone sites: "Clone sites are a strong panda factor (JM, Mar 10, 2014)" I don't have any clone sites, but there are dozens of sites with imitations of mine. We were the first in the area of interest, and then all these other sites that imitated us popped up. None are exact replicas. But many have spun some of our articles and used them to create their sites; the site structures are not identical though. Google seems to know we are the original site on the topic since we are ranked #1 for most terms. Would these be considered clone sites in their eyes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Top 5 link building articles/videos
Hello, What are the top 5 resources for learning how to do a fantastic ecommerce link building campaign? I'm starting by adding 100-200 articles to our site. I'm wanting the 5 most up-to-date resources. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
A Begginer. Learning Lots. Need Advice.
About a month ago I took over a SEO for a small RV company here in Florida. My responsibilities include: SEO, Adwords, Video Production, Inventory Update, Newsletters, Social Media, Etc. I feel a little overwhelmed, but we are a small company and we probably won't be hiring more people. I'm weak in some areas and strong in others. In the SEO area I'm weak. My question is, in the SEO area, where should I be focusing most? I break my SEO responsibilities into a couple areas: Keyword Research (A lot of competition) Back-linking Social Media I know there are more. But where should be my main focus, and how should I go about doing it? Website is http://www.floridaoutdoorsrv.com I would kind of like some one to give me an idea of where I am, and what should I do next. SEOMoz has given me a lot of errors and it's little overwhelming. Thanks in advance for the advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
SEO Features of Different Shopping Cart, Need Help on Selecting BEST Cart
I want to move my existing online store to a new Multilanguage Shopping Cart. After reading Andrew Bleakley's review, I have to make a dissisions between the following shopping cart. New to SEO, I will like to have your impressions on there SEO Features and HELP me select the BEST SEO frendly shopping cart. corecommerce: Search Engine Friendly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze205
• Entire store is search engine optimized
• Dynamically generates static html pages with clean URL's (no numbers and special characters inside the URL's) for products, categories and custom content pages (ie about us, etc.)
• Auto Generated Meta Tags for your store to create web site page rankings that matter!
• Built in Canonical URL's
• Header tags usage for your product names
• Auto-build of the Google XML Sitemap
• Meta tags for all products, categories and content pages
• Add your own custom meta tags from your store
• You determine the page titles
• You can add custom content for the category pages
• Use of alt and title tags for images
• Use of bread crumb trails
• Customer SEO page slugs (naming) for products and categories americommerce: Have a look at there page, the list is to long. http://www.americommerce.com/ecommerce-seo.html ------------------------------ asho Web Optimisation - SEO
Fully Search Engine Optimised (SEO) structure
Optimised and updated by industry leading SEO experts
Source code optimised for search engines
Page based META management. Titles, descriptions and keywords
Link popularity program between Ashop Commerce customers
Always up to date with new search engine algorithms
Spider friendly URLs
301 Redirect and 302 Redirect support for any page
Free SEO tips & tools
Auto HTML and CSS page generation
Google, Yahoo and Bing verification meta inclusion
Inbuilt automatic XML site map generation (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
Correct use of robots.txt file
Correct use of NOFOLLOW attribute
Auto set up with correct hierarchy for H tags
Auto creation of alt text on menu text links and images
Tableless design structure Pinnaclecart Cutting-edge search engine optimization
Flat URL generation (www.yoursite.com/product/product-name.htm)
Ability to create your own URL structure (www.yoursite.com/create-your-own-url.html)
Manage all URL's at the category, product and page level.
If you're moving from a different application, you can change the URL's to match the old URL's.
Meta keyword, title and description for each product page
Meta keyword, title and description for each category page
Meta keyword and description for home page and all pages created via the control panel
Upload / create robot.txt file
Ability to generate meta tags based on product descriptions
Ability to modify HTML or CSS via browser
Automatically generated site map
Generates XML site map for Google Base
Valid WC3 template design
Image ALT tags
Design generates very lightweight, 100% HTML page without CSS or PHP coding
Creates "breadcrumb" navigation
Search-engine-friendly architecture
Ability to upload customized HTML pages to assist in How would you rate those carts structure in a SEO point of view? My existing store, http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ (OsCommerce) need SEO improvement and moving it to a SEO Frendly Shopping Cart is the best thing I can do to increase sales and conversions. Thank you for your support, help and precious time. BigBlaze0 -
Meeting Google's needs 100% with dynamic pages
We have bought into a really powerful search, very exciting We can define really detailed product based 'landing pages' by creating a search that pulles on required attributeseghttp://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length Pop that in a link Short Red Coats on a previous page and wonderful, that gives a page of short red coats in price ascending order, one happy consumer, straight to a page that meets their needs Question 1 however unhappy Google right? Question 2 can we meet Google's needs 100% with a redirect permanent in an .htaccess file E.G redirect permanent /short-red-coats/ http://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
Many thanks
CB0