Videos are probably the most captivating tool for engaging potential customers and guiding them through the customer journey.
For videos to be considered a powerful tool for your online strategy, there is one crucial condition: they must be easily discoverable and suitable for indexing.
This article is about:
Why technical SEO is important for video content. Self-hosting or embedding videos. Tips and tactics for video indexing.
Why technical SEO is important for video content
Creating captivating videos is crucial for engagement, but mastering the basics of video SEO helps search engines index your pages effectively, especially as SERPs expand to include a variety of other media formats beyond the text.
Around February of this year, we were able to observe videos appearing on the search results page through various formats, including carousels and social media platforms such as Facebook or TikTok.
Videos embedded through social media often outperform multiple SERPs. They take some of the search market share away from the proprietary videos that businesses have always used on their websites.
The good news is that fellow SEOs can technically control most things that go through a Google SERP.
In such a varied landscape, doing SEO for your videos can provide the following benefits:
Increased audience reach through improved user engagement. Secure a spot on Google’s Knowledge Graph to help improve Domain brand reputation in specific SERPs by aligning your content strategy with multiple media formats. Simplifying decision-making for search prospects who move back and forth through multiple touchpoints in the consideration stage of the conversion funnel.
Dig deeper: Video search optimization – top tips for 2024
Self-hosting or embedding videos
Have you noticed that Peppa Pig videos on YouTube or TikTok tend to perform better in the top rankings than self-hosted sources?
Embedding YouTube videos may not necessarily result in more backlinks, but it can improve rankings. However, it can expose your website to potential security breaches or spam.
On the other hand, hosting videos locally may attract more backlinks, but may not guarantee a higher ranking, as Peppa Pig proved.
Although it provides greater security and full ownership, self-hosting requires efficient web hosting and a CDN for ample bandwidth.
Contrary to common belief that video embedding is the best shortcut that preserves page speed, auto-hosting a proprietary video requires fewer scripts to download from the server while updating the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).
Take an example from the jewelry segment.
London-based jewelery website Daisy loads 12.9MB in 70 seconds of video embedded on YouTube.
Instead, Tiffany’s charges 8.4MB for a self-hosted autoplay hero video.
With the considerably lower JavaScript file ratio, including a self-hosted hero video on a landing page is unlikely to strain server bandwidth, especially compared to embedding an iframe with a video from your YouTube channel.
However, it’s worth noting that every website is an island and the weight of SEO best practices depends a lot on the type of industry.
Also, in this big trade-off between self-hosting or third-party video embedding, there are several other variables to consider, including:
Internet Connection CDN Web Hosting Platform Geographical Location Device Type
As always, the ideal solution depends on your business goals and how videos can fit as a proposed touchpoint in your customer journey.
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Video Indexing: Key Tips and Tactics
Before diving into indexing, make sure your video pages are crawlable and that you’re helping Google discovers your videos.
Here are some checks you need to do to get your videos indexed correctly.
Video Format
Video file names that contain special characters and underscores can discourage search engines from indexing them.
Additionally, improperly formatted pages with videos may cause some components (eg, SWF) to not be indexed or to be ignored for indexing.
Make sure your videos follow these guidelines:
Descriptive file names: Choose file names that accurately reflect the content of the video.
Supported file formats: Upload videos in any of the supported formats including 3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, DivX, M2V, M3U, M3U8, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGV, QVT, RAM, RM, VOB, WebM, WMV and XAP
Applying these recommendations increases the chances of video indexing.
Structured data
Structured data helps search engines better understand your content, making it easier for them to index.
Google gets a better understanding of your video content when you provide clear instructions or relevant information to your audience.
This is imperative within the e-learning segment where the structured data of the educational videos, the concepts and skills covered in the video contribute significantly to the understanding of the content.
To debug your video’s structured data, you should head over to Schema.org validator and enter your URL to test. You want to make sure that the validator returns a complete @VideoObject schema markup like the following.
Schema markup validation is an important SEO step and should not be limited to the syntax and grammar of your schema.
Once Schema.org validates your @VideoObject markup, you can use the Rich results testing tool to check if the page qualifies for a rich video snippet.
Here are three additional tips for optimizing your video outline markup:
Before implementation, decide between automatic hosting and YouTube embedding so you can use the most appropriate property to nest inside the @VideoObject schema. Google offers one complete guide which covers these options.
Avoid outline mark padding. Not all of the properties I listed in the validation screenshot above are required because they may refer to pieces of information that don’t exist on your website. Includes only existing information to avoid filling outline marks
Align the timezone with the uploadDate schema property. Make sure the time zone specified in the uploadDate property matches the geographic location of the website. Google recently highlighted this to prevent Googlebot from using the default US time zone.
Video sitemaps
If your website is mostly videos, relying solely on structured data may not be enough to tell search engines how important your videos are. Especially if you are a publisher, you may need to create a dedicated XML video sitemap to help Google find your videos.
For your video sitemap, make sure to include the following tags:
The parent element for all information about a single video on the page specified by
A URL that points to the video’s thumbnail image file.
A description of the video
It is used to include a URL that points to the actual video media file and must not be the same as the parent URL.
A video:content_loc alternative for Vimeo, YouTube, and other video hosting platforms that allow video embedding via iframe.
The official video guidelines state that Google prefers
When the video is not the main content
Google has announced that video thumbnails on the main search results page will now only appear if the video is the main content of a page.
For pages with videos to achieve rich SERP results, videos must be the main content. Otherwise, the video is complimentary and will not appear in search results.
In other words, a page with videos may be indexed, but may not rank with its own videos.
But is it really so?
In the wild, you’ll find self-hosted video websites that rank in video mode with a rich snippet.
Research into ‘luxury gems’ in the UK SERPs suggests that ranking for luxury brands in video mode should involve pages with videos as the main content.
However, after clicking on Chaumet’s rich result, you will be taken to the brand’s home page where the video is on the hero banner and introduces the entire product range.
The video is clearly not the main content of the page, but (surprisingly) it still ranks with a video snippet.
I don’t have access to Chaumet’s Google Search Console, but I could test Google’s response for a client with the same video embed pattern.
Although I was unable to provide a screenshot of the specific website, Googlebot was able to detect and index a self-hosted video.
Based on the tests above, you can address the “Video is not the main content” issue by considering:
Placing the video above the fold or in the most renderable area. Automatically host the video in the proper HTML format as mentioned above.
Make your videos easy to find and index
Adding videos to your pages gives your audience a more interesting experience. Google likes pages with a mix of good text, images and videos.
But you have to do it right; otherwise, you may miss opportunities to lead your leads.
Follow these steps to help Google find and list your videos on your site. This way, your video content will be easy to find and enjoy.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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