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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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Content SEO Video SEO

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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Video SEO

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.

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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Aug 30 2023

How to create a video website

There are many reasons why you may want to create a dedicated website for your videos. Perhaps you’re selling a course that you want to put behind a paywall. Maybe you’ve created a video series or podcast that requires its own branded home. Or maybe you just want to create an immersive environment for users to consume your video content, without the typical distractions of YouTube.

Whatever your goal, you can take two approaches to achieve this. You either use the automatically generated pages from a video hosting service or e-learning platform, or you build a dedicated website then embed your videos across it.

Using a video hosting service or e-learning platform

If you don’t want the hassle of maintaining a website, this is the way to go. By using a video hosting service or e-learning platform, you can easily store your videos. These services are also useful if you want out-of-the-box monetization options for a video course.

Vimeo Showcases & Collections

Vimeo offers two ways of building out a quick video website:

Showcases allow you to put together an elevated playlist, which is ideal for a short series. Plus, you get to create a nice looking webpage to accompany it.
Collections are designed to support Vimeo OTT. This is a subscription service for those looking to monetize a library of video in a simple way. It’s priced at $1 per subscriber per month.

Sprout video

Sprout video offers a lightweight CMS that can be used to create a video website with multiple pages – and applied sitewide to a custom domain of your choice. It’s a great choice if you want a simple plug-and-play solution, and you have a fairly large library of video content that you want to categorise by topic.

If you have some CSS and HTML skills, you can customize Sprout video’s CMS somewhat. However, at that point you may be better off building a custom solution with WordPress.

Example video site from Sprout Video

Wistia Channels

Wistia Channels is a great solution if you have serialized video content that you’re publishing regularly, like a podcast. Channels allows you to combine audio and video, and create a branded landing page that looks a bit like a video streaming service. Plus, it includes unique pages for each video.

You can run Wistia Channels on a standard Wistia account subdomain URL. But you can also embed it into any page on an existing website, if you use a simple JavaScript embed code – thereby straddling the options of video hosting service vs. own website.

Kajabi

For video courses and courses that include videos alongside written content in particular, Kajabi is a great solution. It allows you to build a quick video website that you can easily monetize. Kajabi has a very simple WYSIWYG CMS that doesn’t require any web development skills to use. Plus, it can be integrated with an existing website.

Creating a video website

If you’d like to do something more custom, or integrate your videos as part of a bigger web experience, you could consider creating a website with a more traditional CMS before embedding your videos. The advantage of this is not only in being able to build something precisely to your design and structure specifications, but also in having a web property capable of driving traffic from organic search and organic video sources.

WordPress is the ideal base technology

In the vast majority of cases, the best CMS for creating a video portfolio, series or course website will be WordPress. With thousands of video gallery plugins and integrations with all the major video hosting platforms, WordPress gives you all the options you need for a custom video website. Plus, it’s very simple and requires little technical know-how. You can very simply include videos from almost every platform in any page you created with the Gutenberg editor. Meaning: video can be part of the fabric of your WordPress site out of the box.

And if you use WordPress, you can also use the Yoast Video SEO plugin! The video SEO plugin ensures that your videos are indexed in Google, so you can drive more traffic to your website through video search.

Options for integrating videos in WordPress

If you want to integrate your videos more elaborately within your chosen page types, there are a lot of great options out there.

LearnDash

LearnDash is a great plugin for a course-type video execution. It allows you to include videos from any source, like YouTube or Wistia, then create user playback triggers for course progression.

Wistia Channels

As with the standalone solution, Wistia Channels works really well as a way of creating a video gallery within any other page or page type. It creates unique URLs for every video within the gallery. These URLS are indexable by Google, which is great for your SEO.

All-in-one video gallery

This plugin is a bit like a mini CMS within a CMS. It allows you to build a fairly feature-rich video gallery experience within a WordPress website, bringing in videos from YouTube and elsewhere. All-in-one video gallery is a reasonable solution if you want a simple and traditional catalogue of your videos within a single page.

In conclusion: building a video website is fairly straightforward and shouldn’t feel intimidating. Whatever your needs, there are great options out there.

Phil Nottingham

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

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Apr 12 2023

How to stop videos negatively impacting Core Web Vitals

Embedded videos are an increasingly important part of websites. And it’s easy to see why. They add an engaging and interactive layer to all manner of page types. But there is one problem: video files are big. Particularly on lower bandwidth mobile connections, they can be very slow to load.

This can be a problem from a user-experience standpoint, especially if the video is critical for the display of the page (such as with an auto-playing background video). But it can also be a challenge for SEO. Having too many big videos on a page can negatively impact your Core Web Vitals, particularly Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) & Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Let’s dive deeper into these two topics, and what you can do to fix it.

Largest Contentful Paint

If your page includes an inline embedded video, then that video is part of the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). What does that mean? It means the video is a critical part of the page experience, both from an algorithmic and user standpoint. If your LCP time is too slow (for example, when it depends on the execution of a large amount of JavaScript), then you might receive a failed Core Web Vitals assessment in Google Search Console. Which looks like this:

Google likes to see pages load up within 2.5 seconds on a mobile 3g connection. That’s definitely a challenge if HD video files are critical to your page experience.

Cumulative Layout Shift

If videos are the last to load on your page, they can cause issues with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). How? By forcing blocks of text or images to move around on the page as the video is loaded.

To mitigate this, you either need to ensure your videos load with the HTML – but this may block rendering elsewhere – or ensure the frame in which the video will appear loads even before the file asset itself.

Fix with placeholders

The way to fix these issues isn’t to remove videos from your website! Instead, you should be smart about how JavaScript and media files are loaded. With video, this means using thumbnail image placeholders – small image files that load in advance. They can act as a trigger for the video to be played when clicked.

If you use these thumbnails, then the Largest Contentful Paint is complete. Even without executing the JavaScript associated with video players! In addition, you have solved the Cumulative Layout Shift almost instantly.

The solution: Yoast Video SEO plugin

The Yoast Video SEO plugin has a number of benefits for improving your site speed and health. For example, loading thumbnail placeholders! Rather than loading each video file as soon as a page request is made, the Yoast Video SEO Plugin loads up a placeholder image in advance of the videos. While the user views the page, the plugin loads the videos in the background. The result? When a visitor clicks on the play button, your videos are ready.

The placeholder images are also small and quick to load, which means the Largest Contentful Paint can be built out very swiftly. Plus, there’s no danger of a late Cumulative Layout Shift occurring due to a slow-loading video file. In other words: the Yoast Video SEO for WordPress plugin is an easy way to ensure your videos don’t negatively impact your Core Web Vitals!

Phil Nottingham

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

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Branding Video SEO

Feb 21 2023

How businesses should approach short-form video

Nowadays, short-form content is all the rage. Just look at TikTok’s astounding popularity amongst younger generations. It has lead to the development of new and compelling video formats that are mostly found in feeds with a passive discovery mechanism. Or as the younger generations (ominously) call it: the algorithm. In this post, we’ll take a look at how businesses should respond to this trend. We’ll also discuss where short-form video fits within a wider creative content marketing strategy.

Short-form video is not quite the same as videos that are short. It refers to videos that are roughly 06-60 seconds long, organically distributed through feed-orientated social media platforms, and consumed overwhelmingly through mobile devices. They are typically, but not always, shot vertically. This is to keep in line with the screen they’re typically consumed on. You can find short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram Stories, YouTube shorts, and the like.

What about 30-second ads? Are they also considered short-form content? Not in this context. We’re really referring to formats created for organic distribution rather than paid. Another example are short films. They’re historically considered short-form, but in the online world where video has been led by YouTube formats, something that’s 5 to 10 minutes in length is actually considered a mid-length piece.

Short-form video is mostly passively distributed. The user opens up the app in question, presses a button, then receives a stream of content, which they may choose to watch or skip depending on their interests. Depending on the app, the feed is influenced by different things. Instagram’s feed is influenced by who you have chosen to follow, whereas TikTok focuses more on your engagement level with the content and what the algorithm thinks you’re most likely to engage with next. YouTube Shorts sit somewhere in the middle, combining subscription factors, demographic and other data into a complex recommendations algorithm.

Quickly capture people’s attention

Short-form video is geared exclusively to offer instant appeal. There’s a 1-3 second window where users will decide whether to keep watching or move on to the next thing. So you only have a few seconds to try and capture people’s attention. Combined with the short nature of the content, this means that most videos follow a “gag” format. Every video that works immediately sets expectations of what the audience will receive, then swiftly delivers or subverts it.

Visual storytelling

People primarily watch short-form videos on their smartphones. Because this usually happens in in public, most people turn off their sound and watch videos in silence. This means all of the storytelling and creative execution needs to be primarily visual. Videos can still include music, though. After all, some of the most successful short-form videos use music extremely effectively. But it’s important to keep in mind that the essential message and narrative of any video needs to be communicable without sound, such that the essence of it still holds together.

So what can you do for existing videos? You can adapt existing videos by including subtitles and visual overlays where audio or speech is critical to understanding. You can also visually point out to users that the essential “gag” is tied to the musical/aural aspect of the video.

From a business and marketing standpoint, it can be tricky to work out if and when to invest in short-form video. It’s not a reliable way to build an audience or ensure returns, because short-form video discovery is mainly led by algorithms, and less influenced by things like subscriber numbers and historical brand/channel performance. Even experienced creators should generally expect that for every video that gains traction, 30 videos will not.

So it’s important that you’re comfortable with uncertain and unreliable returns. Any business that approaches short-form video with a performance marketing mindset centered around ROI and optimization will find things very challenging. Even one viral success on TikTok or YouTube Shorts probably won’t do anything for the bottom line over the long run. A million hits on TikTok is not going to represent the same value as a million visitors to your website.

It’s absolutely possible to build a brand as a short-form video creator, though. But it’s good to note that brand salience external to the short-form video platforms tends to have only a minor bearing on the effectiveness of distribution. Unless you’re willing to continuously and repeatedly build up your identity as a short-form video creator. However, this can take many months and years. Not to mention, you would probably need to create hundreds if not thousands pieces of content.

So when is short-form video effective?

Short-form video is particularly effective when you can present your brand expertise in a visual format. For example, you could show the creation or function of your product, or demonstrate a process/action quickly. The purpose of these short videos is to provide value to an audience likely unfamiliar with your brand/product, and help them understand a bit about your brand value proposition.

Another way you can use short-form video is by advertising and promoting long-form pieces. If you’re creating a podcast, hosting webinars, or creating longer pieces for YouTube, then short-form platforms are a fantastic way to show clips and trailers of your longer content.

As a rule, if you’re investing in longer-form video, chop up your creation into clips and adapt those for short-form distribution. Your primary goal should be to encourage consumption of the bigger piece – likely to generate a deeper level of engagement with your brand.

Make sure the premise or “set-up” of the video is clear in the first couple of seconds
Ensure your video is fully comprehensible with the sound off. If that’s not possible, you should include overlays and captions!
Consider whether and what sort of music can enhance the entertainment value of your videos, and edit each one with specific tracks in mind
Be clear what you want audiences to do after they watch your video. Is there another piece of content they should watch? Should your audience remember something, or take a specific action?
Create lots and lots of videos. It may take hundreds before you find something that works. This is normal! Keep going.

Phil Nottingham

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

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Jan 11 2023

How to track video SEO performance using Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the best data source for tracking the traffic you are getting to video content on your website from Google search, as it provides data directly from Google about the queries actually driving traffic, and can be segmented by video search specifically.

In this post, we’ll provide a quick summary of how to use Google Search Console to track video SEO. We’ll also post a link to a Looker Studio Dashboard template which you can plug your search console data directly into.

Before you can track performance, you first need to ensure your videos are indexed and recognized by Google Search Console. If you want to know how to do this, check out our guide about how to use the video indexing report.

Navigate to search results in the performance menu. This is the report which holds the data you can use to measure the performance of your videos in search. It can be found in the sidebar of Google Search Console.

The search results report within performance in GSC

Once the report has loaded, scroll down to the table below. Its default setting will be queries, so select the “Search Appearance” tab. You’ll see a list that shows the types of results offered in Universal Web Search.

A list of the types of results offered in Google Web Search

In this list, you should see “Videos”. This refers to rich video snippets shown individually or as part of a video pack within Universal Web Search. If you click on “Videos”, the graph at the top will offer a refined view.

A graph showing traffic from video snippets in universal web search

Note that you can only get an aggregated metric that combines traffic from all video queries and pages at the moment. While this report is useful for benchmarking, it isn’t great for a more granular analysis of your performance of video results.

Above the graph controls, you’ll see boxes that allow you to segment and refine the data. Click on “Search Type: Web” and select “Video”. The graph and table will now adjust to only show queries that drive traffic from video search, so the video tab in Google.

A graph showing traffic from video-specific search

You can then adjust the date range to compare different time periods. You’ll be able to see how traffic and impressions have changed over time.

Scroll down the list of queries to find the terms that drive the most traffic from video search. This will be reported as “Organic Video” in Google Analytics 4. These terms can be exported and organized in a spreadsheet or database, so you can track the keyword-level performance of video content.

With “Search Type: Video” selected, you can navigate to the “Pages” tab in the table. It will display a list of pages that drive the most traffic from video search.

A list of pages driving traffic from Google Video Search

This is particularly useful if you have the same video embedded across multiple pages and wish to see which URLs are ranking most frequently.

While the data within the Google Data Studio interface is really useful for gaining a snapshot of your video SEO performance, it becomes particularly valuable when you move it into a setting where the data can be segmented in more detail. Looker Studio (Formally Google Data Studio) is great for this. And to make it easier for you, we have created a Video SEO Performance Report Template. Simply make a copy of this template, then plug and play with your data.

A comparison of clicks and click-through rates for queries in video search

One of the great benefits of this report is the addition of click-through-rate analysis to query and page-level data in video searches. Click-through rate tells you how appealing your video title and thumbnail are for any given query. So what does a low click-through-rate mean? First, it’s important that you compare the rate to other pages or queries. If it’s still the lowest, that usually indicates that your thumbnail could be improved. You can then use the pages with higher click-through-rates as inspiration to understand what types of titles and thumbnails are working.

Track your video SEO performance

Knowing which videos perform well and drive a lot of traffic is really useful. Because it tells you what people want to see. So if you use this information when you create your content planning, you’ll be able to make more videos that your audience will love. So dive into Google Search Control and look at those numbers! And if you’re serious about using video to drive more traffic to your website, you give your videos the best chance of ranking by using the Yoast Video SEO plugin!

Phil Nottingham

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

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Video SEO

Dec 7 2022

Common rel=”canonical” errors in video SEO

Do you have two pages on your site that are practically identical yet necessary in order for your site to work? And do you need one of them to be indexed in Google search? Then you should use the rel=”canonical” tag. It’s a useful tool in any SEOs arsenal. But where can you find the tag? It sits in the of the duplicate page, and points to the version you want to be indexed. In other words: It tells Google and other search engine crawlers that this version is the “canonical”.

With video marketing, there are common technical implementations that require specific use of the rel=”canonical” tag. For example, to prevent the indexation of duplicate and low-quality pages. There are also common ways many plugins and tools default to implementing rel=”canonical” that can hamper video SEO.

In this post, we’ll break down the common mistakes typically made with rel=”canonical” for video SEO. And we’ll explain how to avoid them!

When self-hosting videos use a custom player and CDN, it’s very common to embed the videos as an encapsulated media file on an otherwise blank page. A video player can then reference the files via iframe or JavaScript. These pages will often live on a subdirectory or subdomain, e.g. videos.example.com/video-5.html. They usually serve no functional purpose for users, except to offer a location from which video players can find and pull in video files.

Because the purpose of these pages is technical and they’re often not linked to (beyond instances in the video player code), the pages are true duplicates. Which means it’s not appropriate to leave them open to the index. However, the pages do need to be crawlable. Otherwise, Googlebot Video won’t be able to find the video files and index the videos.

The best solution is therefore to implement rel=”canonical”. This will make your pages crawlable, while telling Google not to index them. Instead, Google will see them as subsidiary assets for the core page that the videos are presented on. This could mean that you need to adjust default self-referencing rel=”canonical” rules, so these isolated page include self-referencing canonical tags by default.

Solution: Use rel=”canonical” to point isolated video pages to the pages they are primarily embedded on.

When indexing videos, Google considers a video as a child of a page rather than an individual asset with its own distinct URL, as they do with image files. What does this mean? It means duplication at a video level currently isn’t a particular consideration for Googlebot. Even if you include the same video on two pages and implement structured data so Googlebot can find and index the videos, Google doesn’t per se consider them to be the same video.

Note: This doesn’t mean you can publish the same video on as many pages as you like with no consequences. If the pages are otherwise very similar, target similar keywords, and have identical video titles and thumbnails, then this can still create confusion and ranking cannibalization. However, this would be a problem at page level rather than video level.

In the future, there may well emerge a tool to indicate duplication at a media asset level. For now, though, the best solution is to ensure that each page you create contains unique content in addition to any duplicated assets. And trust Google to know which page is most appropriate to rank for any given query.

Solution: Don’t use rel=”canonical”. Just make sure every page has unique copy and other unique media.

What if you need to use the same video multiple times?

For example, if you want to use it on a help page and a blog post. Rest assured, you can still do this without worrying about duplication. However, some people still feel that you should use rel=”canonical” to indicate this duplication. Their reason? The videos are identical, so one of the pages has to be more appropriate than the other to rank. This isn’t true, though. Because rel=”canonical” only operates at a page level rather than a media asset level, it would be an incorrect use of the protocol.

If you want to stipulate to a browser to start a video at a specific point (rather than the start), you would probably use URL parameters. For example, YouTube videos work with a “?t=” parameter, and Wistia videos work with “?wtime=”.

URL parameters are a really useful feature. But they can be especially beneficial for Video SEO, since they allow you to create URLs to use in Clip Schema in combination with VideoObject. This, in turn, allows you to ensure that your videos are indexed for “Key Moments” in Google search, thereby taking up more attention and space in the results pages for any given query.

However, if you use URL parameters like this, you’re technically creating duplicate pages for each “clip”. Which Google isn’t always able to assume should be defaulted to the page root. You therefore need to implement rules which ensure that any URL using the query parameter that stipulates video rules is automatically canonicalized back to the page without this query parameter (typically the root URL).

Solution: Ensure that canonical rules automatically add a tag for URLs with a timestamp parameter. Make it point to the variation of the URL without this parameter included.

Do you have a video lightbox or gallery on your site? If so, then chances are you’re using video plugins or embed codes that use query parameters or hashes to indicate a URL variation.

In such cases, the video player won’t load until the JavaScript is triggered, which is indicated by the adapted URL. For Googlebot to be able to find, render, and index these embedded videos, the URL variations themselves must be crawlable and indexable. This might sound contradictory to the advice we gave before. But there’s a crucial difference between the two situations: The change in content on the page, which occurs with the JavaScript function.

You need to make these types of dynamically generated pages, such as those created through Wistia Channels, available for search engine crawlers. However, we recommend that you don’t use noindex or rel=”canonical” tags. This does mean you have to carefully consider the automatic canonical rules. In addition, you have to ensure that any parameters you use are not automatically grouped in with timestamp parameters, or tracking parameters that are implemented by other analytics platforms. These should be automatically canonicalized.

Solution: Don’t add canonical tags to these pages.

In summary

The rel=”canonical” tag can be a useful tool in your SEOs arsenal. It specifies the “canonical URL,” or the “preferred” version of a web page. This means you can avoid pointing Google towards duplicate content. So if you use the rel=”canonical” tag correctly, it will improve your site’s SEO. Awesome, right? That’s why it’s good to know what the common mistakes are when using this task, and how to correct them.

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 17 2022

How to use the new video indexing report in Google Search Console

In July 2022, Google launched a new video indexing report in Google Search Console. This report will allow you to see how many pages Google has found, crawled, and indexed a video on, and much more. It’s incredibly useful because it helps you understand the foundation of your video SEO performance. Plus, the report also identifies possible fixes for any videos that don’t seem to be appearing in the search results.

So where can you find the report? Easy! Under the index heading in the sidebar of Google Search Console.

The video indexing report in Google Search Console

At the top, it provides a snapshot of how many videos are indexed and how many pages have video data. If Google hasn’t located and indexed a video, it is marked as “No video indexed”.

Green is good. Grey shows that Google had problems indexing your videos

Ideally, every video on your site will be indexed and included in the green tab. In reality, however, there may be issues on some pages that prevent indexation.

In this post, we’ll run through some of the major uses of this report for managing your video SEO.

1. Discover which pages have videos indexed

To find out which of your pages Google has indexed a video on, click on the “Video data about indexed video pages” link just below the main bar chart.

Video page is the indexed page. Video URL is the URL of the video on the hosting platform.

You’ll receive a table that lists the pages where a video has been found, and the URL of the video player or file which has been indexed and associated with that page (usually a link to a page on your video hosting platform). You’ll also see the date the video was last crawled. This is really handy because it’ll tell you how up-to-date the information in Google’s index is.

2. Understand which data Google is using to inform display in Video Search

If you click on any of the results within the table, you can see a granular, page-level report that tells you which discovered URLs Googlebot believes are video files. The method used for each URL is indicated in the report. Usually, though, it’s determined through HTML tags, Open Graph data, or Schema.org markup.

Google tells you which data sources it is using to find and index videos from different hosting platforms

You’ll also see the source of the thumbnail Google chose to associate with each video. This is typically through Open Graph or Schema.org data (labeled as “structured data”).

Lastly, the report indicates “Video Placement”. This can mean two things: Google considers the video to be the core page asset or supplementary content. But don’t worry too much about this identification. Unless you have a page with just an isolated video embed and a title, Google will typically consider your videos to be “supplementary content”.

In many cases, the report will show multiple video URLs for a single video. This can be due to fallbacks and multiple methods of video delivery. As long as each URL indicates the same video, this isn’t a problem, but if there are inconsistencies here, this can be an indicator of why a video is failing to consistently appear in search results.

3. Identify duplication in video indexation

If you export the data from the indexed videos report, you can quickly pull it into excel or Google sheets. You can then perform an analysis to identify any pages being indexed with the same video. It’s easiest to look at the “Video URL” column. Good to note: Video duplication across multiple pages is not necessarily a problem. There are many examples where the same video serves a good purpose in several locations. For example, in a blog post, on a product page, and also within a video gallery page.

However, keep in mind that you lose control of which page Google will decide to rank for any given query where the video is a relevant result. This might cause issues. For example, if you end up sending users to a video gallery page for a query where a product page would be more appropriate.

This investigative work can also illuminate canonical issues, for example with tracking parameters that Google fails to interpret as duplicated content.

4. Assess video indexation problems

Below the core report is a table titled “Why videos in pages aren’t indexed”. This table shows a list of issues Google has encountered while trying to index videos on your website. And it’s quite detailed too. You can find information on each of the pages where this issue was discovered.

Some of the issues are self-explanatory, but some are indicative of wider issues with video implementation

Most common problems

Let’s look at the most common problems you can encounter, and how you can fix them.

Google could not determine the prominent video on the page

This is by far the most common issue you’re likely to run into with video indexation. Unfortunately, it covers a multitude of different scenarios rather than simply “prominence”.

Sometimes it can simply mean that Google found a video on the page, but assessed it was too far down. Or that the video was too insignificant in regards to the page to be included in the video search results. If this is the case, a simple fix is to change the position and size of the video to something more significant. For example, near the top of the page. If your video is already in a prime location but hidden on first paint with some CSS, then amending this may also be a sufficient fix.

In other instances, it can be a rendering problem. If the video requires JavaScript to load, then Googlebot will often determine the video insufficiently “prominent”. Why? Because on a basic page load, the crawler cannot find an embedded video player. This sort of issue frequently occurs when videos are included in carousels or other dynamic page elements.

Cannot determine video position and size

This typically occurs when using a lightbox or other “click to load” feature that rely on JavaScript. Sometimes plugins or tools decide to delay loading a video player until a user presses play. After all, this can save bandwidth and reduce page load times. Unfortunately, the side effect is that Google cannot find or render the videos.

If you’re concerned about site speed and video, the best solution is to load the video player asynchronously. Good news: You can easily do this with the Yoast Video SEO Plugin!

Unknown Video Format

This error means there is a problem with the URL indicating the video file or player in your Schema.org or OpenGraph markup. A common example: OpenGraph sometimes creates a self-referencing URL marked as “video”. In doing so, they create a reference for a video file, which now points to the URL of the page rather than the media asset.

Video Not Found on Host Service

This issue is normally found with YouTube embeds where the video has been deleted or marked as private. If you see this error, the video you’re referencing has probably been removed. The fix? Update the embed to prevent users from receiving an error too.

In conclusion

The new video indexing report in Google Search Console is incredibly useful. You’ll be able to gain invaluable insights into your video SEO performance. Just be aware of some of the problems you can encounter. And have fun clicking through the new reports! If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

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 27 2022

How to make YouTube videos responsive

When embedding a YouTube video on your website, you’ve probably discovered a minor but very annoying issue: YouTube embeds are not natively responsive. This means that when you’re viewing your web page on a mobile device for example, the video doesn’t properly resize with the rest of the page elements. This can negatively impact your website’s design and usability. So why does this happen, and what can you do about it?

Why YouTube videos aren’t responsive

Standard YouTube Embeds, such as the one below, use iFrames to generate an embedded video player:

The advantage of using iFrames? It’s a straightforward piece of HTML. Plus, it allows YouTube embeds to be compatible with the broadest possible selection of use cases, applications and content management systems. YouTube can also update existing video embeds with, for example, new player styles or advertising scripts from the server side without requiring users to change the code on their websites. This works because an iFrame essentially acts as a window to a different page.

Videos sometimes don’t display properly at certain screen sizes. The video above doesn’t fit inside the screen.

But there’s also a downside. Using iFrames can make YouTube videos slower to load on any given page. It could also mean that the videos aren’t always visible on first-paint, since a browser needs to find and load the iFrame before being able to load the video. Finally, and more frustratingly, without CSS or Javascript, there isn’t a native way to make YouTube videos adapt to a container. Which is why the embed specifies a size (560 x 315 by default).

As a consequence, to make a YouTube embed truly responsive and optimized for mobile display, you need to do a bit of extra work. Luckily, there are several simple mays to make it happen.

Method 1: With a bit of custom CSS

The simplest way of using CSS to create responsive embeds is to create a class that features the property “aspect-ratio”. This property allows you to stipulate the aspect ratio of the class you are creating, such that it’s always resized within a container along that aspect ratio. Given that embeddable YouTube videos are all presented with a 16×9 aspect ratio, this means you can use the property to ensure everything scales accordingly.

Let’s look at how method one works.

First, create a class such as “youtube-video”. Next, give it the property aspect-ratio set to 16/9 with the width at 100%.

.youtube-video {
  aspect-ratio: 16 / 9;
  width: 100%;
}

You’ll then need to apply this class to any YouTube embed in the code, while removing the default width and height stipulation.

This method is very simple for anyone comfortable editing basic CSS and HTML. However, it does require some work for each individual YouTube embed. This is less than ideal, especially for websites with multiple authors and editors who likely all try to embed YouTube videos in pages and posts.

Method 2: With Gutenberg Blocks in responsive themes

Some WordPress themes, such as Inspiro and responsive, have features that automate responsiveness for video embeds. So if you’re open to changing your theme and templates, it’s a simple matter of installing one of these. These themes have a CSS rule similar to method one that is baked into the theme. This rule will then be applied to certain blocks, and featured within the theme.

In other words: If you use the “video” Gutenberg block, where you paste in the URL of the YouTube video you want to embed, your videos will remain responsive.

However, be sure to test out these themes with your website first. The specific implementation may not work perfectly with your videos.

Method 3: With the Yoast Video SEO Plugin

If you’re a WordPress user, the simplest and fastest way to solve this problem is with the Yoast Video SEO plugin. In addition to automating the inclusion of metadata, which gets your videos ranking in Google search results, JavaScript automatically resizes the video embed for any device and browser size. Beyond just the container size, the video will adjust its height and width as the page scales. So you don’t need to worry about implementing custom CSS or tiresome browser testing!

In addition, the Yoast Video SEO plugin uses asynchronous JavaScript to speed up loading times for YouTube videos as much as possible. This ensures that your videos are delivered in the best way possible to guarantee high play rates and engagement. The plugin is $79 a year, takes just a couple of minutes to install and set up, and ensures you never need to worry about responsive videos ever again.

Summary

Videos are a great tool to use on your website. People love them! But if they don’t scale with the rest of your site, they can look clunky. Luckily, there are multiple ways to ensure that your embedded videos are responsive. Either with a bit of custom CSS or by installing a useful plugin like Yoast Video SEO, you can make sure your YouTube videos resize properly. You can also opt for changing your theme to one that has automatic video responsiveness. If you have any further questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Phil Nottingham

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

Coming up next!

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