Wistia vs. YouTube

[measurableROI]

Hello, Mozzers!  Sorry if I've missed a thread on this, but I didn't find anything after searching for a while...

I've used Wistia for years - LOVE the service and the company!  Had great luck getting Rich Snippets, ranked well...  until the recent Google change.  Now all of my Wistia thumbnails have disappeared (though my rankings have stayed strong, thank goodness!)  M question is, does it make sense to now embed YouTube videos on our site, and to create a video sitemap with those pages, with the hope that Google will rank the page better than it otherwise would have, knowing that there is valuable (video) content on the page?  This is new videos, I'm not thinking of replacing my Wistia videos at this time.

I'll probably need to clarify as I see your responses, since this is a tricky set of interrelated decisions.  Thanks for any thoughts that anyone may have!  

~ Scott

[PhilNottingham]

Hey Scott,

So I'm actually going to go one better here to try to respond to this question adequately and am going to write a blog post which will be published on the Moz blog tomorrow at this URL - http://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

Hopefully this post will shed some light on the choices you're facing and the decisions you should make. However, I did want to just quickly cover off one misunderstanding with this issue.

Embedding YouTube videos won't make your own pages rank higher compared with ranking videos from other providers. Just because Google owns YouTube doesn't mean ranking benefit is given to sites which embed YouTube videos (do you know how many terrible scraper sites are out there?!) in just the same way sites are not given preference for using Google AdSense on their site as opposed to other advertising platforms (in fact - Panda was designed to penalise those sites which are there just to generate ad revenue without provide value).

The decision about whether to move from Wistia should not be based on whether you will rank higher or not, since neither option will fundamentally make a difference. It may end up being wise, in your instance, to start using YouTube - but only if you can see benefit to having an audience watch the videos on YouTube.com and subsequently not visit your site.

Determine what the best user experience will be - and you'll probably end up with the right strategic answer.

Cheers,

Phil.

[measurableROI]

Phil - wow, I'm honored to have a direct response from you!  I've been impressed by what I've heard / read from you over the years!  

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that simply sticking a YouTube video on a page would cause it to rank higher (as Google owns YouTube), but that having video content on a page can be a signal that the page has more value, than a page without video content at all.  That would be true, right?  (This assumes, of course, that the video content aligns with the text of the page, and is perceived to add value to the user experience - always comes first, I realize!!)

The main question in my mind is this: in the past, I used Wistia videos in order to get Rich Snippets, which seemed to get better click-throughs from the SERP than non-rich-snippet entries.  I couldn't use YouTube to get Rich Snippets, since they weren't self-hosted.  Now that I'm not getting Rich Snippets at all, I'm trying to decide whether to start using YouTube instead.

Thanks so much for your help - I look forward to reading your blog post tomorrow!  ~ Scott

[PhilNottingham]

Having rich media types (i.e. images, video, interactive elements) does appear to correlate slightly with higher rankings, but at best it's going to be a minor ranking signal at best. I don't think having video on a page is necessarily a good signal that a page has value, since there isn't a barrier to entry to embed YouTube videos and there are a lot of very low quality sites out there that just exist to scrape and embed YouTube videos.

In short, no I wouldn't suggest moving to YouTube on the basis of SEO generally - though obviously it's hard for me to offer any more specific advice without further context.

Start by working out A) if your content will be valuable to an audience who find it through YouTube search/recommended videos B) What your main goals are for each of your videos.

Cheers,

Phil.

[measurableROI]

Makes total sense!  I hoped that having a page that ranks well already due to solid content, might get a slight lift by having a relevant video on it as well.  Thanks again for your help!

[KyleEaves]

Seems like Google is leaning toward favoring YouTube content with the removal of Rich Snippets. If you can get the same SEO benefit using a video site map and embedding YouTube videos instead, why not have your website visitors increase your YouTube video view counts and possibly add subscribers while you're at it.