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
-
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
Mirrors Hosting SEO
Hello, I notice that some sites do provide hosting for mirroring file downloading for cpanel, apache and other big developers. I assume that benefits of it is link building but look at this site: http://apache.mirrors.hoobly.com/ Hoobly provide mirrors for most developers but none of them are indexed by google for ex: http://apache.mirrors.hoobly.com/ So can someone explain why would be that or what is going on ? is that something hidden here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eriklogo50 -
Review of our site
Hi Moz-Fans 🙂 I'm doing SEO for about a year now and have a new site to which I do not know where to improve any further. The main keyword is "Webdesign Freiburg" and the site is werkzeug - kasten . com Anyone want to have a look into and tell me what might bring us from page 2 to page 1 on google? Thanks a lot Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
Potential problems with my site
Dear Mozzers I hope you can help me with the following problems: My site is up and running for a year now and may be there has been problem with the homepage, because it ranks on first page for a competitive keyword on Google.com and Google.com.au only, however in other countries it just shows up as internal page and does not rank well. google.com/Google.com.au: homepage ranks top 10 (example.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
Other countries (.co.uk, .ca..ect) an internal page shows up, example.com/internalpage.html - shows on page 3-4. I can not find the homepage of example.com anywhere around top 1000. Can you please tell me what are the potential problems. Thank you very much. BR/Tran0 -
The Site: search and Flow of PageRank
It is my understanding that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com the results are like every other SERP in that the most authoritative pages are ranked higher. So obviously I would expect my homepage to be first (in most cases), then followed by main category pages, etc. My question is has anybody ever seen disturbing results when doing this (i.e. pages that should have no authority outranking main category pages)? Is this always an issue with site structure or can you think of other factors that may cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purch0
