Does Embedding YouTube Videos Help SEO?
If you’re working hard to up your SEO game, then you’re trying everything you can. And that’s great! One area where you may be wondering about is embedding videos. Is it better for SEO to embed a YouTube video onto your website, or host the video through your domain? We’ll tell you the benefits and some possible drawbacks below.
Reasons for Embedding a YouTube Video
You may have noticed that YouTube is considered a search engine now, and it’s doing quite well. It’s the number two search engine in the world right now. So, you know that people are interested in watching videos with the explanations they’re looking for, as opposed to reading it.
Putting a video along with your blog content could help hit both parts of your audience. Those who don’t mind or want to read, and those who would rather watch a video.
Be Sure About Creating Video Content Before Beginning
We’re going to talk about embedding videos in the best way you can. This means that you’re actually making videos yourself whenever possible and not using videos from other people. Creating your own video content can be expensive if you want high quality, which you do. It is more costly if you don’t know what your goals are in creating it. Are you trying to get page shares, social media following, build backlinks, gain traffic, or increase conversions? Hammering out the expectations for this type of content will help when you start to use it for your SEO strategy.
Possible Benefits of Embedding a YouTube Video
Longer Average Session Duration and Higher Engagement
If you have a video on your webpage that is of interest to your users, they’re going to be on that page longer simply because of their viewing time. Videos are also a great way to get a higher number of shares and increase your visibility on social media.
Backlinks
When you use YouTube to host your video, you have more opportunities for backlinks. Someone might link just to the YouTube video (which wont help you get link juice, but is still good) and/or the page that the videos lives on, which will give you the backlink you want. And, if they do link to just the YouTube video then users still have the ability to click to the webpage that the videos lives on, since you will have links to the page in your description. The fact of the matter is that having the video on YouTube simply gives users more options to find you.
Opportunity to be Ranked on Google and YouTube SERPs
When you have a YouTube video or a presence on YouTube at all, you’re also going to be ranked on their SERPs. When you’ve embedded the video onto your website, you can be ranked on both Google and YouTube. Remember when we mentioned that YouTube is doing well at being a search engine? It would be a great for your exposure to be on both platforms.
Benefit of Hosting Videos on YouTube
Just to back up what I said about either hosting your video on your own domain or not, keep in mind that YouTube hosts your video for free. Putting a video onto your website and hosting it can get pricey. You can also see analytics for your video on there, which is of course helpful and imperative to a successful strategy.
Benefits of Hosting Videos on Your Website
While it’s great that YouTube is free, there is a lot that is out of your control when your video is on YouTube. You don’t have a say in what advertisements will pop up in and around your video. You also might not be the one to actually appear on the results page, it could be your video but YouTube is where the searcher ends up. A video on your website will always take the user to your page, not a third-party site.
Regardless of where a video is hosted, the bottom line is that a video on your website will likely increase engagement and that’s what we want for SEO.
Possible Drawbacks of Embedded Videos
Slower Loading Times
If you host a video on your domain, there is a possibility that your loading times could be slower. This would hurt your SEO, the opposite of what you want to happen with embedding a video. YouTube videos may also take time to load, which could frustrate the user. It could also lead a person to leaving your site entirely to go find a different video.
You Must Have Engaging Content
If you’re not willing or able to create high quality videos, then it isn’t worth the time, effort, or money to make them. If your content isn’t truly informational, if there’s too much fluff, and if the production quality is poor, users aren’t going to trust you immediately. Having a large amount of videos is not the way to go about utilizing video content for your SEO strategy.
Something to Remember: Rich Snippets
When you put a video on your website, you want to make sure you’re adding the code necessary to your HTML in order to give Google a rich snippet. This will result in higher click rates because people naturally want to click on the result that has more information.
If you’re wondering about videos on your website, SEO strategy, or even need a full rebuild of our site, reach out to us! We offer free marketing audits by our experts to see where your website is at and how it can best be improved. No strings attached!
