Does Embedding YouTube Videos Help SEO? A Complete Guide

Humans are wired to remember 80% of what they see, and only 20% of what they read. That’s why, it’s much easier to get noticed with visual content than with just words, bringing us to one way of adding visuals to our website without much effort — embedding videos.

Embedding videos have their share of advantages, but do any of them help your SEO strategy? Let’s find out. 

What is a Video Embed and How it Works

Embedding a video involves taking a video from its original source and displaying it on your website. For instance, if you’ve uploaded a video to YouTube and want to share it with your audience, you can embed that video on your site for visitors to engage with. 

It’s important to understand the key element of a video embed – the embed code. This is a snippet of HTML code that enables you to add videos and other types of content to your website. 

Benefits of Video Embedding in SEO

Embedding a video can bring various advantages to your website, including:

1. Embedding a Video Doesn’t Slow Down Your Page

Visuals occupy a lot of space on your website, but embedding a video can work in your favour since it’s not a direct upload. Videos are large file types and they can slow down your website, degrade the user experience, and negatively influence SEO. This can make you lose traffic, rankings, while making you endure additional fees and putting a load on the servers.

On the contrary, embedding a YouTube video is a different practice, which uses code to fetch the video from the source itself. Since the video is sourced from another site, you don’t have to worry about it affecting your website’s loading speed. Furthermore, you can select from various video hosting options.

2. Adds to Your Content Depth and Context

Most visitors skim through the content, especially if it’s large chunks of text grouped together. If you have a page that’s going over 700-800 words, embedding a video can improve your readability and add more value for your users by providing more depth into your topic and its context. If the video is about how to do something or continues a point talked about in the blog, your reader comprehends your content well. 

3. Increased Traffic and User Engagement

In a study, it was revealed that pages with visual content garner 94% more views than those without. Thus, it’s evident visual content significantly outperforms static content in terms of engagement, reach, and conversion rates. 

Since video embedding can increase engagement, it also allows for better page discoverability through a backlink from YouTube itself. When users see an embedded video on your website, they are more likely to click on it, making them spend more time on your page. The result? Reduced bounce-rates and more visit duration, thus improving your website ranking. 

4. Increased Shareability 

YouTube videos are accessible on most platforms, helping your content become more visible and accessible to a wider audience. When your video covers everything a user wants to know about, they would also want to share your website’s link with users of similar interests or pain points. 

Since YouTube is a search engine too, the views and ranking for your video can also increase through users coming to your website. This allows for a multi-channel approach that can single-handedly increase your website traffic and also improve your video’s visibility on YouTube.

How to Embed Your Videos the Right Way and Increase Your Traffic

It’s easy. Just make sure to follow these steps and drive more traffic to your website:

1. Optimise Your YouTube Videos

It’s important to optimise your videos with relevant keywords in your video title, description, and tags. This will ensure that they are searchable, both on YouTube and Google. While doing this, you can also make sure if your video is coming above the fold, which is the visible part of the page without scrolling. Google recommends that embedded videos appear above the fold to be eligible for indexing and ranking.

2. Embed Videos Strategically

Rather than embedding the video anywhere in your page or website, see if you can find the exact place where your video can give more relevance to your content and provide value to the user. You can do this with “How To” guides and other pages that are targeting to solve most queries of your users. Try not to make it sales-y by promoting your products or services in the video, as it can create a negative impression.

3. Provide Structured Data

Include your video pages in a video sitemap to help search engines discover and index your videos. Furthermore, you can also use structured data (like schema markup) to help search engines understand the context of your video content. This will help Google in indexing your video.

Pro Tip: Promote Your Videos!

Don’t leave it at posting. Share your embedded video on platforms like LinkedIn and Meta to increase its visibility. 

Embedding YouTube Videos is Easier Than it Looks

We hope this guide helped you know everything about embedding a YouTube video and what benefits it can get you. Not only is it simple but it can also significantly increase your search engine traffic and visibility on YouTube. If you are still not sure or want professional help, we can do the honours. Contact us if you are looking for SEO Agency in New Zealand and we’ll provide you the right roadmap!