Here are some recommendations for adding video to your dental or medical website:
- Upload on YouTube/Vimeo and embed on your website from there, rather than self-hosting your video. Hosting the video with a third-party service such as YouTube is better for bandwidth speed and for SEO.
- Keep the introductory video very short (under 1 minute). Procedure videos can be slightly longer.
- Make sure the video is high-resolution so it looks good and sharp on your website.
When uploading on YouTube:
- Add a transcript and closed captioning to your video, which improves SEO.
- Make sure that the title of your video is SEO-friendly.
When embedding on the website:
- Don’t put your video on auto-play. It’s bad for usability when people open your page and get startled by a video and sound playing automatically.
- This one is important but often gets overlooked: when you embed a YouTube video on your website, the auto-generated thumbnail may look bad if it captures the moment when you don’t look your best, such as with your mouth open or when you are looking away. You want to look your best on your website, even on a static screen capture, so a little fine-tuning may be necessary. You or your webmaster may need to insert a custom thumbnail image instead of the default one. This helps if you want to display a higher resolution image in the embed player or display a slightly different image for better click through.
- Disable Related Videos. Related videos are thumbnails of videos that appear once your video that’s embedded on the website stops playing at the end. While this is intended to help site visitors explore more videos, you have no control over which videos may show as related. Something there can be videos from other dentists, which you may not want. Therefore, it’s a good idea to disable related videos. However, at the time of writing, YouTube has removed the option to effectively disable all related videos. If you manage a WordPress site by yourself, there are plugins that might help to disable related videos. If you work with a webmaster or web developer, you can ask them to set up a small script that disables related videos automatically on all videos you embed on your website.