Youtube Channel, Video SEO

[TVI]

I am providing some SEO consulting for a friend's company.  They are an Investment Research and Portfolio Management firm.  They started a blog about a year ago with most of their posts being short Youtube videos between 3 to 10 minutes in length, providing their take on what is going on in with the markets at the moment.  Additionally, they've created a youtube channel which has a little over 1,500 subscribers.

The videos do fairly decent getting between 1,500 to 20,000 views (the later happens when a big financial blog links to them) but they are not taking full advantage of this great content in my opinion i.e hosting videos with a 3rd party like Wistia.

I think they should begin using Wistia or Vimeo Pro to maximize the SEO benefits as well as gather analytics about views.  Then after they've milked them all they can put them on their youtube channel and target them for different keywords.

My question is, should they go back and switch out the videos on the old posts with videos hosted by a 3rd party, submit sitemaps, etc. or should they just leave them the way they are and only host new videos with a 3rd party?

I think they should switch out the old youtube videos but am not sure if this could cause any negative repercussions.

[PhilNottingham]

Cool, cheers Kyle. If you wanted to PM me with a link to their YT channel i can let you know where i think the content will perform best.

[TVI]

Thanks Phil all good points to think about further.  I agree that since they are having success with YT it doesn't make sense to completely move away from that.  Applying schema mark-up to the old videos should help max out those videos value.

I will be meeting their team in more depth this week to better understand their business and target audience but from what I know so far it seems their long term goal is to increase their blog's authority and popularity.

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Kyle,

So - I think you should ultimately let the content drive the decision here. You need to consider consider what audience the content will appeal to, where it will perform best and how the content works outside of the context of a supportive page.

Additionally, you need to look at the pages you want to embed the videos on and work out whether these are likely to generate rich snippets/improve rankings with securely hosted video content on Vimeo Pro/Wistia. Is that going to be the best use of the content vs the authoritative YT account they have built up.

My gut is to say that if they've built up a YT channel with 1.5K subscribers and they get up to 20K views per video - then they're clearly doing something well on YouTube and it would be a mistake to take down that content and undo all the good work. While YouTube doesn't necessarily drive traffic to your root domain or provide followed links - it is enormously valuable for branding, expanding an audience base and building out rich page types through embedded YT videos.  Additionally, You also need to check to see if anyone else has scraped the content and uploaded it to YouTube. If they have, there is no point taking it down.

if you split the embedded videos and the YT versions, hosting the embedded ones with a third party - then while you may be more likely to get rich snippets and links - you will prevent the YT videos from doing as well as they can by restricting the overall views to those which took place outside of your site and domain.

Embedded YouTube videos do sometimes provide rich snippets back to the referring domains, especially if you apply schema mark-up, so i'd probably recommend doing that with the historical content and then making a judgement call re future creations dependent on the kind of content it is and what the wider marketing aims of the company are.

Concerning Analytics - the YT analytics are actually pretty good. Hotspots particularly gives you a clear indicator of how the content is performing, so I wouldn't want to suggest switching to a third party for that reason.

Hope that helps! Unfortunately it's hard to make a specific recommendation without knowledge of the company and the content. Video SEO absolutely has to be content driven and I'd hate to recommend something that disintegrated the wider marketing plans.

Cheers,

Phil

[BlueprintMarketing]

I strongly believe that your friend should use  Wistia. Because their great/basically free advice gets so many views but there is a huge problem with YouTube that you it does not bring the people back to them they make people go on listen to something about finance and the people are happy but still end up going to the next thing was  give them the information make much much better videos and the Ardy make now and get them come back to their site they should have a brief maybe 2 to 1 min. part and then say if you want the rest click this Link IT IS FREE then have the rest of the video hosted on Wistia at the end of the YouTube video & under. They take the people the free Wistia video a link to there site. Oh and use Wistia over Vimeo pro because it has site maps. The others want you to change them the have a sitemap.. I hope I was of help, Thomas Von Zickell Blueprint Marketing

[cfguti]

Hi,

I think I'll submit video-sitemaps with all the content and host the new content with a 3rd party.

If he has something like a top 10 or 20 videos I think I'll host them too.

Hope it helps!