Videos in blogs - upload file or embed YouTube video? Which is better for SEO?

[TallAllie]

Hello,

My company recently started a YouTube channel for our current and prospective clients. The subject of these videos are great for adding to existing and future blogs when the subject is mentioned. I post on all of our social media channels when a new video is uploaded, and link the post to the YouTube video.

My question is, what is better for SEO when adding the videos to the blogs - uploading the actual video file to my blog, or embeding our YouTube link? 

Thanks for the help,

Allie

[CRoberts4]

The best thing you can do it just downaload mp3 format from yt1s  and upload it. But if you embed it its also look cool.

[gabriel-nextiny]

Hi Allie,

Our agency started as an SEO agency 16 years ago and we have gone through many changes over the years in the technology we use to host and build websites on, to host and promote videos, etc.

The same way we decided years ago to move all our customer's websites to the HubSpot CMS  (the COS as they used to call it) for reliability and SEO reasons, we decided 2 years ago to move all our video hosting to Wistia for very similar reasons. As Frank mentioned, Wistia optimizes videos for SEO and is built with SEO ain mind. 

Of course, every time you put a video on a page, if people watch it (because the video is engaging), they are spending more time on that page, which ultimately also helps with SEO.

We have also seen that when hosting videos on Wistia and embedding on websites we see extra SEO boost and ranking increases due to the SEO friendly code that Wistia uses. Here you have a link that shows all the SEO benefits of using Wistia for video hosting: https://wistia.com/product/video-seo

Some benefits:

• They include metadata in the code that includes the video title, description, and transcripts.
• Automatic transcript injection (transcript text becomes part of the text of the page)
• They make sure that your videos get indexed on search engines, with links back to your website - not to YouTube or Vimeo.

Also, when thinking about SEO, it is always better to embed directly and not use popup videos, since Google indexes them differently.

I hope this helps.

Gabriel.

Nextiny.

[MFrankJohnson · Accepted solution]

Q: YouTube or 'MeTube'?

It's rarely (with emphasis) a good idea to upload videos to your own website.

Without getting all geeky, it really comes down to who will provide a better video viewing experience for your video viewers -- you or one of the many video hosting providers (including HubSpot as part of their native Vidyard video integration beginning 5-Sep-2018). SEO sorta takes a back seat in this case.

WHY you're publishing video is probably a better place to start the conversation before getting too deep into SEO-talk. Also good to keep in mind that there are MANY reasons marketers are willing to pay good money to host video content using services like Wistia despite being able to do so on YouTube for free. Some of those reasons are SEO-related and some (many) are not.

Again, your reason(s) for publishing video, the types of video you publish, your budget, and many other factors come into play when deciding where to do your hosting. But first and foremost is the viewing experience for your viewers. If that su(ks, nothing else matters.

YouTube vs MeTube = A Big Conversation

[TallAllie]

Thanks Frank! This is great advice!

[MFrankJohnson]

YW @TallAllie, just updated with a link to another thread that talks about the real price of HubSpot's alliance with Vidyard. Please mark as solved if you find helpful.

Best,

Frank