Where to Put Video on Your Website So It Actually Gets Found
Most small business sites bury video where nobody watches it. Here's how to choose the right pages, support each video with text, and keep your site fast.
Most small business websites treat video as decoration. There's a silent clip looping behind the homepage headline that nobody watches, and then every page that could actually use video — the services page, the pricing page, the one explaining what happens after someone books — is a wall of text.
Placement beats production budget. A rough phone video on the right page will outperform a polished brand film on the wrong one. Here's how to decide where yours goes.
Start with the page that already gets traffic
Open your analytics and sort your pages by organic entries. Look at the top three. Those pages already have people arriving from search, which means anything you add there gets seen immediately instead of waiting on a page nobody has found yet.
It's tempting to build video for the page you wish people visited. Resist that. Improve the page that's already working, then move down the list.
Service pages need proof, not decoration
For each core service, a 45-to-90-second walkthrough answering one question does more than a highlight reel: what does this actually look like when I hire you?
Show the process. Show a before and after. Show the person who'd be doing the work. Most people hesitate on service pages because they can't picture the outcome, and a short video removes that hesitation faster than another paragraph of copy.
Keep the homepage video short and skippable
A homepage hero video should be 12 to 20 seconds, muted, looping, and carry no information the visitor needs. Treat it as texture. If someone has to watch it to understand what you do, your headline isn't doing its job.
Put the real explainer further down the page with a visible play button and a thumbnail that shows a face or a finished result — not a frozen frame of an empty room.
Give every video a text home
Search engines can't watch your video. They read the page around it. So every embedded video should sit next to something crawlable.
Write a short summary paragraph above or below the player, in the words a customer would actually search. Add a transcript, or at minimum pull the key points out as text. Give the file a descriptive name — roof-inspection-walkthrough.mp4 rather than final_v3.mp4.
Then add VideoObject schema markup to the page and list the video in your sitemap. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's what lets a video show up as a rich result rather than an invisible embed.
Compress before you upload
A 40MB self-hosted hero video will wreck your load time, and page speed is a ranking factor on top of being the reason people leave.
Two safe options: host on YouTube or Vimeo and use a lightweight facade that only loads the player after a click, or self-host a heavily compressed muted loop under 2MB. Either way, set a poster frame so the page never shows a blank box while loading, and lazy-load anything below the fold.
A simple 30-day plan
Week one: pick your single highest-traffic page and write down the one question a visitor arrives with.
Week two: film three short clips in one sitting — the answer to that question, a process walkthrough, and a customer quote. One session, one setup, one afternoon.
Week three: edit them tight, add captions, write the transcripts and summary paragraphs.
Week four: publish, add the schema, update the sitemap, and note where your metrics started so next month has a baseline.
Thirty days gets you one page done properly. That beats ten pages with a video buried at the bottom of each.
Video only works when the edit respects the viewer's time — tight pacing, clear captions, and a first few seconds that earn the rest. If you've got footage sitting on a drive and no clear sense of which page it belongs on, that's the kind of thing we sort out with clients at MorganMade every week.
This post was created with the assistance of AI.