Have you wondered about the many ways video can fit into your business marketing strategy, yet never dared to take the leap? We know how difficult it can be in B2B to get the C-suite to agree to experiment with creative ways to generate leads online. It can feel as if creating amazing, engaging, and relevant content is not enough of a reason in itself to justify allocating budget to video marketing.
In that case, you need to make the holders of the purse strings understand the importance of video SEO as part of a far-reaching content marketing strategy. If your videos are optimised correctly and put in front of the right audience at the correct stage of the funnel conversion, they could make a massive difference in improving brand awareness, generating leads, or increasing conversion rate.
The power of video for ranking in search
It's been backed up by data over and over again, video effectiveness over text-based content is undeniable.
Information retention is at an all-time high with video content, with viewers retaining 95% of a message in average (against a mere 10% for text-based content).
Purchase confidence is also largely boosted by 80% after watching product videos, hugely influencing purchase behaviours.
Understanding this, Google’s core updates from May 2022 onward seem to give more and more importance to video in its indexing process. Third-party data from Sistrix showed that following its 2022 core update, video sharing sites like YouTube, TikTok and Twitch gained a lot of traction (TikTok’s visibility went up by 133%).
As I'm writing this blogpost, Meta has also just announced that from July 10, 2025 onward, search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing will automatically be allowed to show all public photos and videos from professional Instagram accounts in search result pages, helping more people find content outside of Instagram. It seems that media, including videos, will increasingly "leak" from apps with previously limited access, and it's up to you to take advantage of it!
Is Google's AI favouring video over text-based content?
The short answer is: yes. An article from February 2025 by godatafeed stresses how much product videos are favoured by Google's AI over text-based content such as traditional products pages, mentioning a rise of 25% of YouTube citations just from January to February 2025.
If godatafeed's piece of content focuses on the retail industry's performance, it does feature data about the percentage of AI Overviews citing YouTube in B2BTech. 18% of AI Overviews are directly citing YouTube for B2BTech video content, and figures are expected to keep rising over time (BrightEdge).
So what does it mean? It means that Google's AI is actively mining and highlighting product information from YouTube videos and is including them in its AI Overviews. Tech specs in particular are being extracted directly from product videos, but not only. Users' questions are answered in video highlights too, adding traffic to YouTube videos from Google's AIO.
Do we know for sure what types of video products are performing best? Well, according to Danny Goodwin, editorial director of Search Engine Land, Google's AI tends to favour visual demonstrations of products, step-by-step tutorials and product comparisons.
So you should take advantage of these to break down your products complex features, show real-world usage scenario and most importantly feature problem-solving sequences.
Read more about our video work
What can I do to help my videos rank in search?
Just like any other form of content, writing SEO compliant titles and including relevant meta descriptions play a big part in improving the ranking of your videos in search.
Video should be built for humans to watch, but Google's AI is increasingly mining videos for information too, particularly product-related information. So your creative team should also aim to create videos for AI to understand and skim through.
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Provide context mapping
A video might sometimes pop up in search results because specific queries are answered in so-called "key moments". So don’t forget to add chapters to your videos if you are hosting them on YouTube (Google’s subsidiary) or Vimeo. Both support Google’s “key moments” feature, highlighting specific sections of video in search results. But don’t forget to plan to film and edit audience-relevant video content that satisfies your audience search intent in the first place!
- Facilitate text extraction
Captioning videos by enclosing closed captions (.srt, .vtt or similar files formats) helps with SEO (Vimeo, 2025). Did you think that since video content is inherently visual, Googlebot couldn’t crawl it? Well, they can! An effective way to improve your video ranking is to include stand-alone transcripts. Understanding this, 254% more businesses captioned their videos in 2023 than in 2022 (Wistia, 2024).
Additionally, search results with a video thumbnail seem to make up to 30% of current organic search results in Google according to Semrush data (2025).
Regarding Google's AI mining of video information, in addition to text extraction (analysing overlay texts, captions, and descriptions) and context mapping (identifying video highlights to answer search queries) mentioned above, it is also able to carry out a frame-by-frame visual analysis, process audio, and understand authority scoring (engagement metrics and content value of the video). So make sure to provide it with the right sort of information to mine!
Can Google sanction my website for featuring on-page videos?
Have your web developers ever dissuaded you from showcasing videos on webpages claiming that Google will sanction your website if page-loading speed is too slow? Well, they're not wrong, it could impact your on-page SEO performance.
But if the speed a page is loading at is an important factor that Google takes into account when indexing online content, using video on a page can have a lot of benefits too.
First of all, it may make users stay longer on a page, lengthening the duration of recorded sessions on your website.
But beyond that, Google does seem to favour ranking pages with a video if the video is the sole focus of the page.
So if you want to create a landing page whose main point of interest is a longer video to convince an interested prospecting customer to get in touch with you via the form on the page, then it will be likely that Google will positively index your page.
Wistia's State of Video Report 2025 landing page
If you are still worried about the negative impact videos can have on your website performance, there are ways around it. Getting in touch with seasoned web designers and web developers who will be able to monitor your website’s on-page SEO performance and make sure your pages are optimised for desktop, mobile and tablet is a very good starting point.
A reliable video editor will also make sure to export your video using the best possible settings for later search engine and website performance optimisation, making sure to preserve the best video quality to file size ratio.
Finally, strongly consider hosting your videos on platforms such as Vimeo or YouTube from which they will be easily embeddable on a page rather than hosting them directly on your website.
What other video-related restrictions should I take into account?
It may be worth mentioning that Google will remove videos that violate its Community Guidelines or policies related to copyright, misinformation or hate speech. So make sure that your videos remain both compliant and sources of reliable information that Google can trust. Send the right signals!
Can I harness the power of link-building with video content?
Yes! You can also use video as a way to develop smart and safe link-building. Let's take the example of YouTube. YouTube is great for hosting videos and giving you access to great analytics tools to monitor your ROI video by video.
But the other reason you should be hosting your content on YouTube is that it remains the second largest search engine after Google according to Search Engine Journal. People tend to turn to it when looking to answer queries, but beyond giving your viewers relevant answers, you need to capitalise on having caught their interest.
So make use of embedded links in videos or in the description of your videos to encourage viewers to download content or to take action on a landing page. Don't hesitate to also suggest more content from your channel by including clear end screens to your videos leading to more videos or playlists.
Is there more to it?
There are subtle and less subtle differences in video SEO strategies across platforms and apps. It’s important to understand good praxis when sharing a video on a specific platform or app, and what needs to be achieved by it.
Be it YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, or LinkedIn, they all have their specific technicalities to take into account, and their users will also be interacting with content differently. They will also have different expectations. So maybe don’t upload that landscape ratio-ed, 15-minute long how-to video to TikTok and leave it for your YouTube audience to “find” and Google's AI to mine...
On a case-by-case basis, experiment and track your data on each platform to see what type of video performs best. It’s great if your YouTube videos are found and gather a certain amount of views, but make sure to track other data like view duration to understand when your viewers drop off from watching your videos, or which chapter they are jumping to.
That is it! Stay tuned as Google and other search engines will carry on adjusting the way they index information, but we can expect a steady increase in video indexation. So take advantage of that multi-channel marketing strategy and start a discussion about investing in video marketing to diversify your approach to lead generation!
More resources
- Video Tips: 16:9, 1:1 and 9:16 in videography | Aspect ratio explained
- Video Tips: Filming in HD, FHD or 4K? | What you need to know
