Should I bother with a Video Sitemap?

[TMHoward86]

Morning all,

I've started a pretty aggressive Video content push in recent weeks. All our videos are on our YouTube channel. I decided to go with hosting the videos on YouTube based on my research on moz.com, especially considering the potential reach of the content on YouTube.

What I'm finding is that the YouTube channel is doing great. We've hit 200 subscribers and 15K views in a little under a month. Wayyyy more than I could have ever hoped for. But the blog posts on our website are getting minimal traffic and no search visibility. That doesn't necessarily bother me, since the intention of our marketing campaign is to use YouTube to drive traffic to our website. So I guess my question is really more to do with optimizing the site with Video Sitemaps and best practices for Google Webmaster Tools.

Right now we have YouTube videos embedded on blog posts like this one that have a time-stamp. But I've been working to create Gallery-style pages (no time-stamp) which would have multiple YouTube videos embedded on them like this one. These make it easier for visitors to watch multiple videos without needing to skip around to multiple blog posts.

The challenge I'm running into is that when I go to submit a Video Sitemap to GWT I get an error saying that I have duplicate page content within the video sitemap. I've used several WP plugins to do this. It seems that when there is a video embedded on multiple URLs (pages + posts) the plugins will ignore the posts and only add the pages to the video sitemap.

• Here is my regular Sitemap
• Here is my video Sitemap

I've attached a screenshot of my current Yoast Video SEO config if that's useful for reference.

Does anyone have experience with using multiple sitemaps in GWT? I'm starting to think that maybe I shouldn't even bother with a video sitemap. Maybe those gallery-style pages should just go in the regular sitemap?

Any thoughts or advice would be highly appreciated! Thanks

llQfydA

[Linda-Vassily]

Yes, the videos have a common theme and we rank pretty well on long-tail variants of the main keyword. The bounce rate for that page is well under average for the site and we get a handful of new users every day.

[TMHoward86]

I'm actually struggling to even build a video sitemap at this point. The Yoast SEO plugin is causing trouble and won't put my pages into the sitemap at all.

How do you optimize your gallery-style pages? Are you focusing on a top-level keyword? Something common to all videos?

[Linda-Vassily]

This is an interesting question for me. We have been doing video for a while and do it like you, hosted on YouTube. I have never really considered a video sitemap, because I always assumed that YouTube will outrank us for any given video of ours (the typical situation if you have your content on a much more powerful website). And that is what I do see on video search.We do get some organic traffic to our gallery-type page, though. For now, I will probably keep things the way they are, since we get a good amount of traffic from YouTube and that is the main point, but I would like to hear if anyone has had video sitemaps boost traffic to their own site.