Jan 17 2024
Google’s video search update: What’s new?

In December 2023, Google rolled out a significant update to its rules and guidelines concerning video indexation and rankings. The landscape has shifted, and it’s crucial for webmasters to adapt to these changes for optimal visibility in Google search results.

What changed?

In the past, any page with a visible video to Googlebot-video and appropriate structured data could secure a ranking with a video result. However, Google’s new approach focuses on pages that are explicitly designated as “video-focused”, or where video is served as the primary content.

New name for video search

Google now refers to video search as “video mode”. This could hint at a potential evolution in search verticals. Certain queries may trigger video results, complementing the traditional method of selecting “videos” beneath the search bar on google.com/video.

Time to reevaluate your strategy

This shift necessitates a reevaluation of your video SEO strategies. While you could previously integrate videos throughout your website to enhance your content and earn video rich snippets, Google now requires a more targeted strategy. 

The solution? Create a dedicated Video pagetype to align with Google’s new criteria. For businesses invested in video and SEO, this new pagetype should offer a secondary location for existing videos on your site.

Create a video pagetype

As we’ve just discussed, the best response to this change is to develop a new pagetype that specifically caters to Google’s shift. So, what should these pages look like? 

The new video pages should:

  • Have a single video per page.
  • Ensure the video is at the top of the page.
  • Ensure the video is presented in a large frame (at least 640px x 360px).
  • Ensure the video has rendered within the viewport after first contentful paint (you can test this out using pagespeed insights).
  • Have supporting information around the video, e.g. title, description, transcription.
  • Contain no other images, interactive elements or extensive copy.

You should also consider crafting a “video library” page. This can act as a centralized category page for all video content, and help facilitate user navigation.

Keep adding video everywhere

Does this mean you should no longer use videos on your pages and in your blog posts? No. While they are no longer eligible for video results, videos are still beneficial for your site. They can still improve user experience, increase conversion rates, and positively impact all of the user signals that feed into the ranking algorithm. 

By using videos, you will still be telling Google that there’s rich content on the page, which could potentially improve your rankings in general.

Don’t worry about duplication

With the addition of video pages, your videos will likely exist in at least two locations on your site: one where they are integrated in a wider page, e.g. blog post, product page, and on a dedicated video page.

You might start to worry about duplication – am I confusing Google with duplicate content? The answer is no. Google will see integrated video as a page element, and duplication of elements is completely normal across websites. As for the videos on a dedicated page, Google will see those as being the core content. 

The benefits

By having a video in two places, you can rank for video results and ensure that your existing pages are improved with rich media. You may also find then that for some queries you can receive two results: a standard listing for the page/post with the video embedded, and a rich video result for the video page.

If you’re putting your videos on YouTube, then you may even get a third result for the same query – one leading to youtube.com. So having multiple locations for your video can enable you to take up more real estate for important and competitive queries.

What about old pages that used to rank with video results?

Don’t worry too much about old pages. While they may not rank with video snippets any more, they will probably still rank. Just with standard blue link results.

Conclusion

With Google’s new update, your old video SEO strategy probably won’t work anymore. That’s why you should design pages that are explicitly designated for videos. 
If you’re looking for tips on how to create video library pages, check out this post on optimizing a video gallery, and this post on building a video website!

Phil Nottingham

Phil Nottingham is a marketing strategist who specialises in video SEO and brand strategy and search engine optimization.

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Nov 22 2023
Integrating your video strategy with your blog strategy 

While we live in a video world, blogs aren’t going anywhere. As Cindy points out in her post about the future of blogging in a video-obsessed world, there’s still space for blogs and written content in a world dominated by short-form videos. As TV hasn’t precipitated the demise of books or newspapers, there is room for written and video content in web marketing. Let’s find out how to integrate your video and blog strategies.

A different experience

The core distinction between video and online writing is consumer experience. Written content requires active participation from the reader. They must determine which sections to focus on and at what pace to take the information.

Video is a more passive form of consumption, where the creator determines the running time and controls the experience. You can’t skim-read a video. It also plays across conceptual, visual, and aural faculties, whereas text only connects with us on a conceptual level.

In today’s mixed-media world, the best use of blogs and videos is an integrated strategy. In such a strategy, each form influences the other and works together.

There are a few ways you can think about getting started.

Turn your blog posts into videos

Certain posts are ideal to convert into videos, giving them extra life beyond your blog. You can post these on YouTube and social media. In addition, you can use these to augment and improve the quality of your blog posts.

The blog posts that tend to work best as videos are those with a strong individual editorial perspective. We know these as “op-ed” type content in traditional journalistic language.

When the post is written with the voice and expertise of an individual, hearing from that individual on camera helps to add authenticity and credibility to the post itself. It ensures the core message can be distributed across social media more effectively.

The simplest way to do this is to plan for a talking head video after writing the post – either as a monologue or an interview.

Firstly, reverse engineer your article to determine the theme (core message). Find the points that help explore and explain the theme.

Write these down, and then sit in front of a camera. Talk your way through them, or structure a more formal interview where an interviewer asks questions about each point to get you (or the writer) going.

These videos can then be edited to include branded visual elements, text overlays, and cropped for the optimized formatting of different platforms.

Generally, it’s better to shoot 16×9 horizontally, with the talent’s face in the center of the frame. From there, crop these to create vertical videos for TikTok and Instagram.

Turn your videos into blog posts

Do you have a YouTube channel that’s driving a lot of views? Do you seem to get a lot of engagement with your video posts on LinkedIn? Think about how those videos might be able to be adapted to a written form.

Sometimes, you might be creating a quick video based on an idea, and lo and behold, it seems to resonate with your audience or pick up a lot of views from a YouTube search.

Perhaps it’s then worth thinking about whether there’s a blog-style execution of this idea that would work. Examples of this might be a list of step-by-step instructions for a tutorial idea or several slides and images with supporting text explaining what they show.

A simple way to get going here is to pull out the transcription of the video. Once you have that, reformat it into plain text, and then use this as a basis to edit. Tools like Descript are great for pulling the transcription from any video, and you can then export it to Word or Google Docs.

If your video is rambling or unstructured, you can use ChatGPT or another LLM AI to summarise the core points in more of an article form.

Remember that the nature of media types on the web is much more fluid than ever. Blog posts can encompass video embeds, images, audio, interactive elements, and more.

Consider instances where a mixed-media approach may be preferable to just pure text. Find out where the different media types can support one another. Recipes, for example, are often great when they include lists of ingredients, a summary of the method, some supporting copy, an image of how the final product is supposed to look, and a video demo.

So, as you plan out a content calendar, consider before drafting the possibility of video as part of any posts you’re writing, and bake that into the creative process. Even if you don’t have production resources to do more than a simple talking head video, it can help with EEAT factors. You can demonstrate authenticity and use the personal connection offered by video to build trust.

Don’t forget to implement Video SEO

One of the great benefits of adding video to your blog posts is that these pages can rank in video search and Google organic search. 

By implementing Video SEO — which Yoast Video SEO for WordPress automates — your blog posts can appear in the “videos” tab in Google and sometimes as video results with a rich snippet in universal web search.

This means you can use video to improve user experience and drive more traffic to your blog!

Phil Nottingham

Phil Nottingham is a marketing strategist who specialises in video SEO and brand strategy and search engine optimization.

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Oct 12 2023
How do I optimize videos for various platforms and screen sizes?

One of the challenges with video marketing today is optimizing your content for distribution across multiple platforms, all presenting content in very different ways. What works well on YouTube will not automatically translate to TikTok. Even within platforms, there are different format options, e.g., YouTube shorts vs videos, Instagram posts vs stories. At least for some of your videos, you must consider how to transpose from one platform and format to another. Always consider the types of screens on which your audience will watch the videos.

Website

You can present videos on your website in any aspect ratio or size. Your audience will watch these on various desktop and mobile devices.

However, if you want the videos indexed and visible in a Google search, it’s best to stick to the typical 16×9 widescreen aspect ratio. Using the Yoast Video SEO for WordPress plugin, you can stipulate a thumbnail and additional structured data to ensure your videos generate traffic.

In addition, it’s vital to ensure videos on your website are responsive so that they scale with the rest of the page and present nicely on phones and tablets without half the thumbnail moving off-screen. If you use a paid hosting platform like Wistia, it handles this automatically, but you need to do some extra work for YouTube embeds to make them responsive.

YouTube

YouTube videos are in a 16×9 widescreen format, with YouTube shorts in a vertical 9×16 format. This makes YouTube shorts feel “mobile first.” The broader video format has a more filmic and televisual format.

Keep this in mind when creating videos for both formats. Shoot the video with the focal point very much in the center of the frame. This way, you can crop it effectively without losing the essential content or quality of the image. If it’s a talking head, give lots of space to the sides if shooting horizontally and above and below it if shooting vertically.

If you have created a vertical video and wish to adapt it for a widescreen format, there are lots of creative ways in which you can “pillarbox” the video with graphic elements to the left and right of the moving image. Tools such as clipchamp and wave.video allows you to do this very simply. Adobe Premiere and Premiere Rush can similarly scale this process with template projects.

The same goes for adapting a widescreen video for YouTube shorts. You can “letterbox” the video with some bars featuring supporting text or imagery. This is a reasonable alternative to cropping the video entirely. Especially if the content doesn’t look very good in a different aspect ratio. For example, when the video features a single wide shot of two people. 

Facebook

Facebook allows for a wider variety of aspect ratios than YouTube, and videos presented in the feed can fit all shapes and sizes.

You can post videos in 16×9 (standard widescreen landscape), 4:5 (old-style TV format, but vertical), 1:1 (square), and 6×19 (vertical phone) formats. For Facebook Stories, videos are in the 9×16 vertical format.

Therefore, Facebook can accept most video formats created initially for other distribution platforms without adaptation. Sometimes, letterboxing 16×9 videos to turn them into 4×5 and adding supporting text that adds context when the video is viewed silently can help, so it’s worth testing different formats for your particular videos and seeing which gets the best engagement.

The tools for optimizing presentation with the different YouTube formats also apply to Facebook.

Instagram

Instagram works like Facebook. It supports multiple formats but it presents the videos slightly differently.

Instagram reels in the feed will show as 4×5 vertical. When clicked through, present as 9×16 vertical, so a taller image. You must create and post videos that work creatively in both formats. Make sure you can crop them from 9×16 to 4×5 and comprehensively contain the core work.

For assets that start as 16×9 widescreen videos, this generally means letterboxing them with supporting text. For videos that start as 9×16 mobile videos, this means just ensuring any overlays or animated elements on top are within that core 4×5 frame of the video so they don’t get cropped off by the platform automatically.

Instragram Stories are ostensibly the same as Facebook Stories. Videos are only available as 9×16 vertical pieces. Reposting Reels/Feed videos with some supporting text above and below the videos is a common way of repurposing them for Stories.

LinkedIn

In theory, LinkedIn supports a wide variety of aspect ratios. But in practice, you’re better off sticking to landscape widescreen 16×9, or 1:1 square videos. 9×16 vertical videos get automatically pillarboxed.

Stick to 16×9 for those videos with wider shots with landscapes, multiple people, and a more filmic style. For simple talking heads or animations, use 1:1 videos because they take up a bit more screen real estate in the feed.

If you’re shooting vertical videos for Instagram stories or TikTok, etc., and wish to give them further life on LinkedIn, just leave enough space at the top and the bottom of the video without too much going on to look good when cropped.

TikTok

TikTok videos are 9×16 vertical and designed to be shot with a phone. There’s often enough space for a whole body, e.g., the initial use case of dancing videos. You must adapt 16×9 widescreen videos considerably for TikTok. They tend not to perform well when only superficially changed with letterboxing. 

Accordingly, you must create videos for TikTok exclusively with the platform in mind. Although videos used in Instagram Stories and YouTube shorts are naturally well formatted for TikTok.

Best practice principles for optimizing video on different platforms

You must consider where the video will live for the plethora of social media and video platforms available today. Do this before shooting it so you can plan to edit and optimize the content for the device and format it will be presented.

Generally speaking, videos will be one of two types of creations. 

They can be primarily filmic, i.e., 16×9 horizontal creations made horizontally with a camera or phone. These will feature wider shots, probably different levels of zoom, and relatively small camera movement. This is the type of thing you’ll typically make for your website or YouTube

Alternatively, they can be mobile videos, i.e., 9×16 creations, shot vertically on a phone. They tend to be closer, focusing on a single subject matter, often with large amounts of camera movement. This is the type of thing you’ll typically make for TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram Stories.

Optimize video for different platforms and screens

To optimize video for different platforms and screen sizes, you must adapt each type of video differently to make them work within the platforms you haven’t shot explicitly for. Generally, you need to crop the video or add additional graphical elements in a pillarbox or letterbox to fit them in. 

Phil Nottingham

Phil Nottingham is a marketing strategist who specialises in video SEO and brand strategy and search engine optimization.

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