5 Tips To Get Your Videos Ranking
(TL;DR: the video is at the end of the article)
TL;DR, it's in the name, right? I don't know if this includes Too Long, Didn't Watch, but what the heck, this one is worth it. We hear so much about SEO. We even here about ASO. One thing that comes up less frequently, however, is Google's Search & Discover. Yesterday, Google Search Central's channel on YouTube published an awesome video with 5 best practices so your videos can rank in Google Search & Discover.
How To Optimize Your Video SEO?
Google’s presentation on video SEO explained to us what we could do to see our videos ranking. When Google can understand what a video is about it will know how to surface the video in Search and Discover.
Here’s a recap; have fun optimizing your videos!
Video SEO Signals Google Looks For
When Google crawls a page and id's a video, it look for signals seeking to understand what the video is about. Those signals are what allow the video to come up in search results.
Google uses these signals to understand a video:
On-page text: Page title, headings, and captions near the video.
Referral links: Backlinks from other sites linking to the video. (If you haven't signed up for my newsletter, you should. My readers know this part already.)
Structured data: Markup that communicates video metadata to Google.
Video files: Google can read the file itself so as to understand the audio and visual content.
It's all about putting everything together before you sit behind the keyboard to upload and publish.
Google’s Recommended Video SEO Tips
Google recommends these five best practices for getting found and understood by search crawlers.
1. Make Your Video Publicly Accessible
It speaks for itself; go public. A video also needs to be easily visible on a page without requiring complex user actions to load.
2. Use Structured Data
To help Google find videos and understand what they’re about, site owners can provide structured data using Schema.org or Yoast. Wix offers structed data rigth in your page settings.
Additional structured data can be used to enable special search features, like the “LIVE” video badge for live streams.
3. Provide High Quality Thumbnails
Provide high-quality thumbnails for each video at URLs that Google can access.
If a thumbnail isn’t accessible to Google the page might not be able to appear in video features.
4. Submit a Video Sitemap
Video sitemaps are another way to help Google find video content associated with pages on your site. You can learn how to here.
A video sitemap can also include metadata tags to help Google understand what the videos are about.
5. Accessible Video Files
Make sure Google can fetch your video content files so your pages are eligible for search features like video previews and key moments.
Video previews are a feature in search results where Google grabs a few seconds from a video to use as a clip, which can be more engaging than a static thumbnail.
You can use the max-video-preview robots meta tag to control the length of these previews.
When Google can analyze the content of videos using the file itself it can surface them for more relevant queries.
See Google’s full presentation below: