How Video Marketing Improves SEO Rankings in 2025

Why Video Marketing Matters for SEO in 2025

When I started Draft.dev a few years ago, search engine optimization (SEO) teams weren’t really spending much time worrying about video marketing. Video was expensive, and it wasn’t clear that search engines even indexed that content well, so most SEOs put their budgets into written and image-based content.

But it’s 2025, and a lot has changed in SEO and content marketing.

Because questions about the role video content plays in marketing and search engine optimization are so common, I decided to do a little experiment on one of our sites to see what impact adding videos to existing written content would have on SEO. Today, I’d like to share those results and some of the lessons we learned from this experiment.

• Why Video Marketing Matters for SEO in 2025
• Does Adding Video to Existing Content Improve SEO Rankings?
• Video Marketing SEO Case Study: 3 Real-World Experiments
  • 1. Embedding Video in a Listicle
  • 2. Embedding an Interview-Style Video
  • 3. Embedding Video Into a New Blog Post
• Video Marketing for SEO Takeaways

Does Adding Video to Existing Content Improve SEO Rankings?

The theory that many in SEO have put forward is that adding video content to a page helps SEO by improving engagement, time on site, and the perception of the page’s quality.

Here’s what makes video particularly powerful for SEO in 2025:

• Increased Dwell Time: Pages with embedded videos see average session durations 2.6x longer than text-only pages
• Rich Snippets Opportunities: Video content creates additional opportunities for featured snippets and rich results
• Multi-format Search Results: Google now displays video thumbnails directly in search results for relevant queries
• AI Overview Integration: Video content is frequently referenced in Google’s AI-powered answer boxes

Presumably, the embedded video needs to be relevant, and since we’re (mostly) optimizing for Google, we also assumed that embedding a YouTube video would be more helpful than some kind of on-site player.

So, we nominated a few articles where our search engine traffic had been slowly declining, and made a plan to record, edit, publish, and embed YouTube videos on each page. All of these examples were done on the same domain, so while the total traffic numbers varied depending on the queries each page captured, the baseline authority should be about the same.

Video Marketing SEO Case Study: 3 Real-World Experiments

Experiment 1: Embedding Video in Evergreen Listicle Content

• Baseline Performance: 150 daily impressions, 1-2 clicks per day
• Video Format: 20-minute “talking head” style walkthrough

The first article was an evergreen, 4-year-old listicle with about 150 impressions and 1-2 clicks per day. While the traffic had been higher in previous years, search traffic had declined to the point where it was effectively a dead post.

The video we created for it was a “talking head” style video walking through each item on the listicle and essentially discussing it for 1-2 minutes. The final video was about 20 minutes long and to be honest, not all that fancy. Besides being branded, we didn’t do a ton of effects, have multiple camera angles, or quick cut a bunch of snappy footage in.

Despite the relatively low lift, the video had its desired effect. We updated the post of February 7 and within a month, impressions and clickthroughs were starting to accelerate.

While growth has slowed a bit over the past few months, it seems that the piece is continuing to pick up more traffic and impressions as its average position improves and new backlinks are added.

This was an encouraging first result, so we continued with another test.

Experiment 2: Interview-Style Video for Technical Topics

• Baseline Performance: <100 daily impressions, sporadic clicks
• Video Format: 45-minute expert interview

The next piece we decided to tackle was a high-level topic with many long-tail keywords. It had been pretty stagnant for over a year, sporadically getting a few clicks from search, but the impressions were pretty low (<100 per day).

So, we recorded a 45-minute interview with an expert on the topic and embedded it into the blog post. Again, this was a relatively low-effort video, but it was relevant and fit nicely with the narrative of the post.

The piece was updated on April 15th, and pretty quickly, impressions in search started to pick up. Unfortunately, clicks through to the article never caught up, so my suspicion is that this piece got caught in Google’s AI summary arbitrage. In other words, the post is being referenced in AI summaries more often, leading to more impressions, but people don’t click through on AI summary citations.

Still, impressions are good for branding, and with some further generative engine optimization (GEO), we might be able to get this piece more clicks.

Experiment 3: Video-First Content Creation Strategy

• Video Format: Multi-expert interview with ChatGPT-assisted transcription
• Target Keywords: Niche topic with 100-200 monthly searches

One obvious question I had next was, “will embedding a video from day 1 help a blog post rank faster or perform better?”

In this case, I actually recorded the video first. The video was an in-depth interview with multiple relevant experts on the topic. We then took the recorded video and had ChatGPT create an outline and fill in most of the high-level topics. It pulled quotes from the speakers and gave us a pretty good starting point for the article.

The topic was very niche with an estimated search volume of 100-200 monthly searches, so we knew this was never going to be a huge traffic driver, but it was a high-value topic, so it was worth tackling.

From month 1, the article was in the top five search results for two of the keywords we were targeting, and within 3 months, it hit the top 3 for those topics.

This example is tougher to benchmark since we published it with the video from day 1, but I do think it supports the argument that video content embedded in high-quality, SEO-focused marketing content does improve search performance.

Video Marketing for SEO Takeaways

It’s nearly impossible to control all the variables in a test like this, but based on this experiment and some of the others we’ve been doing for clients at Draft.dev, I can say that there’s something to the theory that having embedded video on marketing content generally improves SEO.

Certain content types seem to benefit more from videos, though. In general, roundups or listicles, technical tutorials, and thought leadership content can all be more impactful with an embedded video, but having a strong SEO foundation matters. You can’t just write an article on any random topic, embed a video, and expect to hit the top 5 search results for a topic.

Content and SEO strategy matter a lot, especially in the age of AI.
If you’re interested in talking about how video can improve your SEO-focused marketing content this year, reach out to us. At Draft.dev, we work with some of the top developer tools companies to ensure their content is relevant, technically accurate, and effective at producing business results.