Video SEO

Video SEO is the work of getting a video that lives on your own pages indexed by Google and shown as a video result: a thumbnail in the main results, an entry in Video mode, a card in Discover. It is narrower than the name suggests, because Google’s rules exclude most of the video on the web from it, and the first job on any site is working out whether those rules include you.

Two adjacent topics have their own pages. Ranking a video on YouTube itself, and why YouTube is cited so heavily in Google’s AI answers, is YouTube search. Searching by pointing a camera at something, including Lens video queries, is visual and image search. This page covers the video you host or embed on a domain you control.

Where do videos appear in Google Search?

Google’s video documentation names four places: the main search results page, Video mode (the Videos tab), Google Images and Discover.¹ A video result carries a thumbnail, a duration and an upload date, and can gain a moving preview, key moments that jump to a segment, or a LIVE badge for a stream.

The presentation narrowed on 13 April 2023. Until then Google showed a video thumbnail in two formats: at the start of a listing where the video was the page’s main content, and after a listing where a video was present but not the main element. Google removed the second format, saying that in experiments the change “has had minimal impact on overall engagement for publishers”.² A text page with a video somewhere on it lost its thumbnail; only pages built around a video kept one. The rest of this page turns on that rule.

What is a watch page?

A watch page, in Google’s definition, is a page whose “main purpose is to show users a single video”.¹ Its examples are a video landing page, a TV episode player page, a news video page, a sports highlight page and an events clip page. Its counter-examples are the pages most sites actually have: a blog post that discusses an embedded video, a product page with a 360-degree video, a category page listing several videos at equal prominence, and a film review with an embedded trailer.

Only a video on a watch page is eligible for video features, and the eligibility list is strict.¹ The watch page must itself be indexed, and Google adds that it “must be performing well in Search before its video can be considered for indexing”, with a note that an indexed page does not mean an indexed video. The video must be embedded on the page in a standard element (<video>, <embed>, <iframe> or <object>), must not be hidden behind other elements or loaded only after a click or swipe, must be in a supported file type, and must have a thumbnail at a stable URL; a video behind a paywall needs paywall structured data “so that Google can still find and index the video”. Google indexes one video per page.³

Most businesses have no watch pages. Explainer clips inside articles and demo videos on product pages are worth having for the reader, and Google says a non-watch page “can still be eligible to appear as a text result”,¹ but no markup turns them into video results. Video SEO applies where video is the product: publishers, course platforms, recipe sites with a video per recipe, sports and events sites, and any business willing to build a dedicated page per video, which is Google’s own recommendation “if it makes sense for your business”, each with a unique title and description.¹

Does an embedded YouTube video count?

Partly. If a watch page embeds a YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook player, Google says it “may index the video both on your web page and on the third-party platform’s equivalent page”, and both can appear in video features as long as each page meets the indexing criteria.¹ Google still recommends structured data on your own watch page and allows it in your video sitemap, and asks you to check that the host lets Google fetch the video file, which previews and key moments depend on.

The trade is control against reach. Hosting on YouTube gives the video YouTube’s own audience and a second indexed page you do not maintain; hosting it yourself, or building a real watch page around an embed, is what earns the video result for your domain. Neither is wrong. What does not work is expecting a YouTube iframe dropped into an article to do either job.

How do you mark up a video with VideoObject?

VideoObject structured data is how you tell Google what the video is, and Google says adding it to watch pages “can also make it easier for Google to find your video”.⁴ Three properties are required: name, thumbnailUrl and uploadDate in ISO 8601 format, ideally with a timezone. Without them Google “may not be able to extract any information about the video”.⁴ The recommended properties are where the value is: description, duration, expires where a video has an end date, and above all contentUrl, the address of the video file itself, which Google calls “the most effective way for Google to fetch your video content files”; embedUrl is the fallback where a file URL is not available.⁴

Two rules matter more than the property list. Every video on the site needs unique name, description and thumbnailUrl values, and every source that describes a video (structured data, sitemap, Open Graph tags, the HTML) must agree on the title, thumbnail and video URL.¹

Key moments, the timestamped segments shown under a video result, are the feature a reader notices. Google detects segments automatically and says it will “prioritize key moments set by you”.¹ For video you host there are two routes: Clip, nested in hasPart, gives each segment a start time, an end time and a label; SeekToAction tells Google how timestamps appear in your URLs so it can link into the video itself.⁴ A YouTube-hosted video takes its key moments from timestamps in the description instead. Two robots directives govern the rest: max-video-preview caps the length of the moving preview, and nosnippet opts a page out of key moments entirely, including the automatic ones.¹ As with every structured data feature, Google does not guarantee that the markup produces the result.

Do you need a video sitemap?

A video sitemap is an XML sitemap with extra tags describing the video on each page: its title, description, thumbnail, player or file location and duration. Google recommends it, supports mRSS feeds as an alternative, and describes its purpose as helping find video “that was recently added or that we might not otherwise discover with our usual crawling mechanisms”.⁵ Structured data on the page comes first; the sitemap earns its place on large or fast-moving libraries, and wherever the embed is injected in a way Google’s renderer may miss.

The sitemap rules echo the watch page rule. Google says not to list “videos that are unrelated to the content of the host page”, giving the example of “a video that is a small addendum to the page”, and every URL in the file must be reachable by Googlebot: not disallowed in robots.txt, not behind a login, and on HTTP rather than a streaming protocol.⁵ A sitemap entry for a supplementary video does not make it eligible; it adds a row to a Search Console reason.

How do you measure video indexing?

Search Console has a dedicated Video indexing report. It counts indexed pages where Google indexed a video against indexed pages where it found a video and declined it, and it names the reason for each decline.³ Two totals are worth reading first. If indexed-plus-not-indexed is lower than the number of video pages you have, the problem is page indexing, not video indexing. If the not-indexed count is high, the reasons list is the diagnosis.

The reasons are specific enough to act on. “Video isn’t on a watch page” is the structural one, and Google’s own suggestion, if you believe the page is built around the video, is to move the player higher in the HTML. “Cannot determine video position and size” means the player is not on the page at load, typically a screenshot that must be clicked. The thumbnail family covers missing, unsupported, undersized, transparent, robots-blocked and unreachable images. “Video not processed” links to Google’s stable URL guidance.³ The Performance report’s Videos search appearance filter gives impressions and clicks, and URL Inspection shows a Video indexing section for any page where Google detected a video.¹

Does self-hosted video help in AI search?

Google’s AI features documentation lists “supporting your textual content with high-quality images and videos, when applicable” among the things that help a page appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and its AI optimisation guide says the generative features “can bring in relevant images and video”, pointing back to the same video SEO documentation this page is built on.⁶⁷ That is the whole of what Google documents: the eligibility rules are the ones above, with no separate treatment for AI answers. No other platform documents indexing self-hosted video at all. What is measured about video in AI answers is measured about YouTube, and sits with its caveats on the YouTube search page.

Common video SEO mistakes

• Marking up a video that is not the page’s main content. The markup validates, the report says “Video isn’t on a watch page”, and nothing was ever going to appear. Decide whether the page is a watch page before touching schema.
• A click-to-play image where the player should be. Google needs the player present at its real size on load. A poster image that swaps in the player on click reads as no video.
• Expiring CDN URLs. Signed URLs that rotate every few hours defeat both the thumbnail and the file fetch. Give Google a stable URL for each, even if the player uses a signed one.
• Blocking the file or thumbnail. A robots.txt rule on the media host, or a noindex on the streaming URL, removes previews and key moments and can remove the video result.
• Different metadata in different places. A sitemap title, a schema name and an og:title that disagree cost you the thumbnail. One source of truth, generated into every format.

Footnotes

1. Video SEO best practices — Google Search Central ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. Simplifying video presentation on Google Search results — Google Search Central Blog, 13 April 2023. ↩

3. Video indexing report — Search Console Help ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Video (VideoObject, Clip, BroadcastEvent) structured data — Google Search Central ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Video sitemaps and alternatives — Google Search Central ↩ ↩²

6. AI features and your website — Google Search Central ↩

7. Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on Search — Google Search Central ↩