Google search results are not just text results but also show video results. These results are sometimes shown on the 1st page itself or in the videos tab.
A new update in Google's official documents about good video SEO practices says a direct and simple answer to rank your videos. This advice from Google is helpful in SEO for video production teams.
Until recently video optimization for SEO consisted of video marketing keywords in the title, description and links. But with this recent update, Google gives the answer to the optimization of videos for the web directly.
Google's Video Optimization Tip
A recent update has been made in the Google official docs about optimizing videos for SEO here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/video
This is one of those updates that I liked recently. It gives you the direct answer without beating around the bush.
The second point in this checklist from Google tells you directly that you need to have a dedicated page for each video you want to rank.
This is a very important point to be noted by SEOs. Because this was never highlighted in any of the video or YouTube SEO tutorials.
Google says that you need to have a complete dedicated page just for one video at one time. The main important subject of the page has to be the video and the content surrounding it.
This does not mean that you cannot use that video on other pages of your website. But it should have at least one page that talks all the details about that video.
Having a dedicated page for the video on your website helps the Google bots to index it correctly and find the key moments, live badges and other such features to show up on Google search results.
Video's background SEO is done this way. A dedicated page to the video and then use it on other parts of your website.
A lot of News websites and eCommerce websites use videos on their websites. This is a good SEO practice. But no one until this update cared to create a dedicated page for videos only.
Get Your Videos On Google
Getting your videos on Google is what video optimization is all about. Properly optimized video can rank well on Google and get you the traffic for keywords that are difficult to rank for in text format.
Many websites and top Ecommerce companies use the videos appropriately for their products. They also embed it correctly with the right alt tags.
This announcement from Google about the best video SEO practices now has to be implemented correctly by these websites. Because if video marketing for search engines when done correctly can bring in a substantial amount of traffic for the website.
Creating dedicated pages for the videos for Google also means a new part to be taken care of by your website. So Google also says on the same page that having a separate sitemap just for the dedicated pages of videos is also a good practice.
Having a video sitemap for your sitemap will help your videos rank in the organic search results. So make sure you submit your video sitemap in Google Search Console to index your videos faster.
Video SEO Checklist
Video SEO is important to rank your informative and unique videos for relevant keywords in search results. This is done with the right video optimization techniques.
Here we have briefly explained these techniques as a checklist for your reference.
1. Embedding videos with the right tags.
Usually the videos are embedded with or tags. Make sure you are using the and tags too. Using the right alt tags with these tags with the keywords will help also.
2. Speed Loading.
Make sure to keep your videos easily accessible for the Google and Bing bots as well the website visitors. The server should load the videos immediately without much time lag.
3. Robots.txt insertion
Always keep your videos and their dedicated pages open for indexing the website's robots.txt file.
4. Video Transcript
Putting a video transcript always helps. It will be easy for the Google robots to read and match the transcript with the video and then index the video for relative keywords.
5. Right Title and Description
After this direct answer from Google, your new dedicated pages for videos should have the right title and description of the video. This includes the right title for the video too.
SEO Affects After This Google Update
This update of Google docs is important because it also clears a lot of myths surrounding Google SEO over the years for videos.
One of the myths was that to not place more than one video on the same page. Now after learning from this update, if the videos are placed on their dedicated pages, this myth is no more useful for video SEO.
You can now place multiple videos on the same page if they are relevant to the content of the page. And the condition here is to have dedicated pages for the video talking about the content of the video.
Another most important point we can learn and test now is to do more effective video SEO from here on.
Is video important for SEO?
A question that a lot of people have asked me over the years “is video important for SEO?”
Now I can answer them with Google official source that:
Yes, videos are important for SEO.
Google has clearly said in their documents that it is good to have a dedicated page for every video on your website. And this page has to have content related to the video.
And this video is then used on other pages with relevant information. So if the dedicated page of the video has good authority and link juice to it, the page that will embed this video will be benefited from it.
This is why I said at the beginning of this post we said that this is a very important update and to be noted by every SEO specialist. Even the advanced SEO specialists need to learn here as this is the first time Google has answered its SEO practices directly.
Final Words
This video SEO update from Google is the most important update I have seen recently. It teaches us directly how Google's algorithm is designed to index and rank web videos for websites.
It also opens a new door for SEOs to create pages especially for videos and then embed them in other parts of the website. Proper SEO techniques applied to the video pages can help rank both the video and the content embedding it.
Based on this update, our team at UnderWP will be working to rank the video pages for the websites by applying the right SEO strategy to them. A similar strategy we use for content SEO. Because now the video pages will have relevant content in them.
And doing link building to these pages that are completely dedicated to the videos and the content inside them will improve website authority over the time. Getting yourself monthly link building packages for your website will improve the overall SEO rankings.
Subscribe to our newsletter to learn more about this technique that we are going to experiment with within the coming months and stay ahead in SEO.
This is a big news for Video SEO. Never knew that placing videos on a single page with its details will help it rank better in Google.
When you think about it it makes sense as YouTube does the same thing. Each video has its own page and comments.
So in a way Google is saying to put videos same as Youtube on your website and show its metrics like video views, comments, likes and dislikes etc on that page.