Embedding Video for SEO? YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia?

[Jazee]

I believe Vimeo has the advantages of being able to embed your video on your website without advertising and the ability to brand the player with your company name. Can't do that with YouTube. However obviously Google give a bit more weight to YouTube videos in search results. But I'm talking about ranking the website, not the video.

If the objective is to provide the biggest boost to the website's ranking (not the individual video), is it best to embed the YouTube video or can you post the video on both YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia and embed the Vimeo or Wistia video?

My gut feeling is that Google would see the direct linkage between the video on YouTube and the website it's embedded on and potentially that would have (albeit probably small) more benefit in the website's ranking than embedding the Vimeo or Wistia video?

HOWEVER, re the SEO claims on this Wistia page true? Would the best strategy be to use Wistia for embedding and then also post the videos on a YouTube channel for maximum exposure?

From Wistia:

_Vimeo, like YouTube, is a powerful domain for SEO, but when you host your videos on these platforms, you are not doing your website's SEO a favor. When you upload your video to Vimeo or YouTube, the search engines are indexing the original url, not your website's. In contrast, when you embed a Wistia video on your website, your website gains all of the SEO benefits.

Vimeo videos are ranked to drive traffic to Vimeo to keep users on their platform. Wistia videos drive traffic to your website—not ours._

[Jazee]

That's a great article but although he breaks the goals into three nice little categories, the reality is that many businesses may want equal emphasis on all three goals (brand awareness, consideration & advocacy, conversion) so it still leaves things pretty 'gray' in my opinion.

So let me give a specific example to focus this thread a bit more narrowly.  Let's say the business is brand new so there's no brand recognition and the website has just been launched.  And let's say its a photography business where the business' work portfolio is KEY in really all three areas at this point (branding, consideration, and conversion).  It seems the article is recommending that if you're new, and your video content is important for consideration & conversion, then you should FIRST privately embed it on your website (via Wistia).  After your site starts to rank well (which could take a LONG time), THEN create a Business YouTube Channel.  Although YouTube has such high domain authority, I would think you would still risk having your YouTube videos rank higher than your website.  But can you not embed lots of branding into your Youtube videos, right?  Like links to your website within the video.  So if your business is based around producing images (photography and video) maybe it would be the best strategy to do both approaches simultaneously and not delay the YouTube Channel building.

[Joe.Robison]

I would follow the Whiteboard Friday methodology, since clearly Moz has thought about this strategy (I hope). They post the Wistia video on their site and then post a YouTube video.

You'll only ever see YouTube and Vimeo videos in the search results with the video snippet, you won't see a Wistia video snippet. If you want people to link to your website, then having it embedded with Wistia only is the way to go and don't post it on YouTube. But if you're looking for the most video views and exposure you should do both.

There have been a few changes since this post, but this post by Phil Nottingham has the best breakdown on the options.