Google Shares Five Tips For Video Optimisation

Google SEO companies employ various methods to optimise video content for online businesses with the goal of achieving higher visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are many factors that come into play in the optimisation process, and it’s easy for businesses to overlook certain things that could make or break their video’s rankings. To help SEO companies and webmasters out, Google shared five best practices that should be followed to get the best results.

These five tips were mentioned in the Lightning Talks episode on the Google Search Central channel. Google made a presentation about video content for SEO, discussing how website owners can send signals to communicate the context of a video.

When Google crawls a webpage and notices that it contains a video, it will look for signals so that it can better understand the content of the video. There are different types of signals that webmasters and SEOs can use to make search engines understand videos better, such as on-page texts, structured data, referral links, and video files.

Once Google receives these signals, the search engine will have a better understanding of what a video contains. Then, it will have a better idea of how to rank the video content in Search and Discover.

Optimising videos for SEO is all about adding the proper elements to a webpage and allowing Google to receive the right signals. Below are the five tips that Google shared:

1. Make video publicly accessible

The very first piece of advice that Google shared with SEO companies and webmasters is to ensure that the public has access to their video content. This means that they must double-check their videos if they have corresponding webpages with a URL that Google can access.

Moreover, site visitors should be able to easily find the video. Therefore, it is advised to make webpages more user-friendly, ensuring that site visitors can access the video without the need for any complex inputs.

2. Use structured data

Google also told businesses and site owners to provide them with structured data. This allows the search engine to find videos and understand their context. The markup may include information such as video content file URLs, thumbnails, descriptions, durations, video titles, and more. Moreover, additional structured data can create special search features, such as the “LIVE” feature for clients who upload their live streams.

3. Make high-quality thumbnails

Google SEO companies and website owners should make high-quality thumbnails for their video content, and these should be accessible to Google. If not, the webpage will not be able to appear in video features. Google will not have access to it if robots.txt is blocking the thumbnail URL, for instance.

4. Submit a video sitemap

Video sitemaps help search engines find videos uploaded and published on websites. These can also contain metadata tags so that Google can know more about the video content.

5. Accessible video files

Aside from ensuring that the video content is accessible to the public, webmasters and SEOs should also give Google access to their video content files. This makes their videos eligible for search features like key moments and video previews.

Video previews refer to a feature wherein the search engine chooses to show a small part of a video and uses it as a clip instead of a static thumbnail. SEOs can also make good use of the max-video-preview meta tag if they want a longer preview.

Businesses and webmasters need to be extra careful when optimising their video content for the highest visibility in the SERPs. If you are struggling with this task, seek help from Position1SEO today!

We are known for driving our clients’ rankings forward and helping their website earn a place on the first page of Google’s search results. We use efficient linkbuilding strategies and optimisation techniques so that your webpage content – whether articles or videos – can be crawled properly by search engines.

Call us now on 0141 404 7515 or email us at office@position1seo.co.uk, and we’ll be more than happy to discuss the appropriate SEO package for your needs!