Google has realized the potential of short videos with the amazing growth of short video platforms like TikTok. It is making a trial to show short videos on its search engines.
Surprisingly, this trial and soon-to-be Google update will affect your SEO rankings too. Check out how we solved this mystery below.
Google's Short Videos
Before we solve this mystery of SEO rankings with short videos, let's go into a little bit more depth about these new Google trials.
The first appearance of these kinds of Short Videos results was seen in November of 2020. Most of the results were from YouTube and TikTok then.
On October 3, 2021, Brodie Clark on his Twitter posted the screenshot of this trial.
In the above screenshot, you can see that the search term “easy recipes” on Google US shows a Short Videos carousel. This carousel consists of videos from Youtube, TikTok, and Facebook.
Not to confuse them with web stories. These are proper videos from different platforms.
Web stories on Google are also a good way to increase your website reach. These are usually shown in the Visual Stories section.
The above image is a perfect example of short videos and web stories. You can see short videos carousel with videos for Facebook. The Visual Stories section is from individual websites.
We have written a nice post about web stories and their effects in coming times here: https://underwp.com/web-stories-on-google-from-wordpress/
Is Google Negotiating A Deal With TikTok and Instagram?
It was also rumored in late September 2021 that Google is trying to get a deal signed up with TikTok and Instagram to index their videos.
This is supposed to be a similar deal between Google and Twitter in 2015. There was no official announcement of this from either Twitter or Google.
But since Google does not have anything similar to Twitter in its social arena, it might have worked well for both companies.
When it comes to videos, Google's YouTube which is the second most visited site on the internet has also started YouTube Shorts as a short videos section inside the YouTube app. This is a very fast-growing section among YouTubers too.
It will be interesting to look at how this deal will fall through for Google. Because here Google is negotiating directly with its competitors.
If this deal falls through, Google will try to be more of a Video and Text search engine in the coming years.
Prediction
I am guessing it will start to get a timeline for itself similar to Facebook on its search results page itself. This is just an assumption from myself.
But if it does, then this will definitely be the smartest move from Google. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Then you can find images, news, videos, short videos, web stories related to your search in Google itself. No need to search different networks or leave the Google page.
Works pretty well for Google advertisers as well. And the websites that are ranking on top of Google.
Benefits Of Short Videos For SEO
Did you know that short videos are called Live Streams also in Google documentation? Google stated this in their new E-commerce SEO documents here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/ecommerce/where-ecommerce-data-can-appear-on-google?hl=en
It was not clear when this document for the Google SEO course to eCommerce platforms when was mentioned.
Now with this news, we can join the dots and make sense of it.
Google has said to engage with your customers on interactive live streams and show them the products. The reason behind this is maybe they will soon start indexing short-length videos in their search engine results.
After reading the Google docs and this news, we can conclude that if you want to rank better on Google, it is better to start making short videos. Short videos about your blog posts, products, information, and anything related to your website and niche.
There is a possibility of a new Google update in the coming months when it will start showing your TikTok videos in its search results. Better be prepared for this new Google update.
Final Words
This news opens up a lot of possibilities to reach more audiences for your website. With visual media, it is also expected to rank higher in search engine results with Google. We have seen this with YouTube already.
And when we try to fit the puzzle of Google SEO by reading its documentation for E-commerce SEO, it is clear that these short videos on Instagram or any other platform will help you gain SEO value for your brand and website.
Even though Google tries to be smart by not showcasing its Google ranking signals, it does leave some footprints once in a while. This is one of them.
If you haven't already started to work with short video platforms like Instagram or TikTok, I suggest you do as these might affect your SEO rankings. And if this deal falls through for Google, then you will be ahead of your competitors when this update is implemented on Google search.
With Google trying to gather data from all the possible sources, I think we should be careful of what we talk about on other platforms for our brand.
I guess optimizing videos for Google on other platforms will help in the long term for a brand. I can see how these short videos can help Google get better results for its visitors. It would be interesting to see how Google will take this foreward.
Good find. No wonder I have seen a good increase in my Tiktok videos that are old. Maybe Google is trying to rank them. They were informative videos related to money making niche back when I started new on Tiktok. But then I lost interested as not much views were seen. Now I have started seeing increase in their views. And this is completely unknown source. Maybe Google has started to implement this update seriously now.
I have seen different video results on Google search lately. Maybe this unannounced update is the reason for it.
Google is now showing videos from Facebook in my search results in Japan. Maybe soon they will start showing from Instagram too. As they both are from the same company, Meta.