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If you use a collapsable div or CSS to hide the text, it should be absolutely fine. View the page with JS and CSS turned off. If you can then read all the text, then you've done it correctly.

There are actually very few Ecommerce companies doing video right in terms of SEO - including My Binding, who get outranked by YouTube for most of their videos. It's worth noting that putting product videos on a YouTube channel is invariably a bad strategy, so I'd look outside of channels and search for some good sites with securely hosted videos on them, rather than YouTube embed.

However, in terms of content, i'd recommend looking at www.appliancesonline.co.uk who I think do superb product videos and have superb product pages all-round actually.

I recommend having a read of the following posts i've written on this topic. The answer is always somewhat nuanced, but hopefully this will give you a good overview of the perspective you should be taking when trying to answer your question.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/

I think they'll eventually get to the point where the auto-generated transcriptions are also indexed, but currently the transcription quality just isn't quite accurate enough across the board to make that possible.

Yes. YouTube's machine generated transcriptions don't get indexed, but transcripts you upload will. This will then allow your YouTube videos to rank for long tail queries relevant to the text of your transcript (much like page copy). You can also "keyword stuff" your Transcriptions to optimise the video for certain keywords.

NOTE: You can and should keyword stuff in a Whitehat way, not just plough tons of versions of the keyword into the text at random points. What i mean by this is... for example, if you want to rank for the name of the actor performing in your video - then you could append "actor's name: " to any line that they speak. Additionally, you could add some descriptive text explaining what's going on - rather than just copying the recited text.

I generally concur with the comments so far - it's definitely a good idea to have the transcript within the HTML, marked up with Schema.org and available for users to see.

Set your <div>  to style="display:none" and then include a button which will trigger the text display in a drop down, tab or Lightbox overlay.

Alternatively, the Jquery route that Irving suggested is just as good.

Whatever the solution you go with, you just need to stick to the principle of allowing the text to be visible and easily accessible to users if it's also going to be visible to the search enginges.

However, if you're already including transcripts flat on the page, then aside from aesthetics, there's no reason to bother hiding the text .

Without having explored the page and the sitemap, I would say that what your developer says is entirely possible and represents a good way forward from your situation.

Google have made a shift in the past few months with the way they index sitemaps - and if everything more or less matches up, even if they can't see the video on the page, they will often ascribe the page with a rich snippet and index the page as if there is a video present.

It's not surefire and having the video hidden beneath JS and delivered dynamically can prevent content being indexed - but it's certainly worth giving it a go (especially if you're using Wistia, as it's a simple process) and seeing if the video content gets indexed anyway. If it doesn't work, then I'd recommend going back and seeing if you can find a way to make the embed visible outside of the JS (perhaps just hide it with CSS and make it visible in a separate tab?). You could then have two methods of triggering the video playback for users if you wish.

Cheers,

Phil.

Shouldn't be an issue - Just make sure you update the <video<span id="GRmark_2ce5acbd7b47b7ac2b2825e56148aff00b0d7c8d_::0" class="GRcorrect">:duration> field in your video sitemap to reflect the extended length.</video<span>

Alternatively, can you just add a JavaScript link overlay as the call to action? You wouldn't need to increase the length of the video to do this.