Mastering Video SEO: Best Practices for Optimizing Your Video Content
Video content is increasingly becoming a dominant force in online engagement, and Google actively indexes videos across a multitude of websites. Your videos can potentially feature in various Google sections, including search results, video search, Google Images, and Discover. To maximize your video’s visibility and impact, adhering to video SEO best practices is paramount. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you ace your video SEO game:
Video SEO; Assisting Google in Discovering Your Videos
Ensure that your videos reside on publicly accessible web pages that aren’t obstructed by robots.txt or noindex meta tags. This facilitates Google’s ability to locate and index your video content effectively. To optimize exposure, consider creating dedicated pages for each video, allowing the video to take center stage. Features like Key Moments and Live Badge often require such dedicated video pages.
Employ suitable HTML tags to encapsulate your videos, such as <video>, <embed>, <iframe>, or <object>, facilitating easier identification by Google. Crafting a video sitemap further streamlines Google’s discovery process.
Avoid lazy-loading primary content that necessitates user interaction for display. Overly intricate JavaScript for video embedding may impede Google’s indexing efforts.
Ensure videos are prominently displayed and easily accessible on your video pages. A standalone page for each video with a distinct title and description can significantly enhance visibility.
Third-Party Embedded Players
When embedding videos from platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, Google may index the video on both your webpage and the hosting site’s equivalent page. It’s advisable to provide structured data for your embedded videos and include these pages in your video sitemaps for better indexing.
Provide High-quality video thumbnails
A valid thumbnail image is crucial for video SEO and eligibility in Google’s video features. Actus Deep Schema automatically populates thumbnails for YouTube videos, but you have the option to upload custom thumbnails for better optimization.
Leveraging Structured Data for video SEO
Structured data describing your video content aids Google in comprehending video context for relevant queries. Consistency in information across structured data, titles, thumbnails, and video URLs is vital. Actus Deep Schema provides a seamless way to furnish comprehensive structured data for all your videos.
Enabling Video Content Access
Google needs access to fetch video files to understand the video contents and enable features like video previews and key moments.
- Use structured data to provide the
contentURLvalue in a supported file format. - Don’t block Google from fetching the video’s streaming file bytes. For example, don’t block the video content URL or domain with the
noindextag or robots.txt file. - The video host page and the server streaming the actual video must have the bandwidth to be crawled.
- The video file must be available at a stable URL.
Unlocking Specific Video Features
By implementing structured data effectively, Actus Deep Schema enables eligibility for rich snippets like:
Video previews
Google selects a few seconds from your video to display a moving preview, which can help users better understand what they’ll find in your video.
Key moments
The key moments feature is a way for users to navigate video segments like chapters in a book, which can help users engage more deeply with your content. Actus Deep Schema automatically detects the chapters in your YouTube videos and provides the proper structured data to Google in order to show key moments to users in search results. Alternatively, you can manually enter chapter information to indicate the important points of any video.
Live Badge
For livestreaming videos, you can enable a red “LIVE” badge to appear in search results by using BroadcastEvent structured data (supported in upcoming Actus Deep Schema updates).
Optimizing your videos in accordance with these best practices not only enhances their discoverability but also augments user engagement, ultimately propelling your video content to new heights of visibility and impact in the digital sphere.
Click for more about Video schema markup with Actus Deep Schema.
Note from Google: Not all features are eligible to trigger on all queries. Google doesn’t guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results; learn more about why in our general structured data guidelines.
