At the May 2021 Google I/O conference, John Mueller announced that there are brand new Schema markups for displaying your video content in the SERPs.
You can now implement the clip markup, which allows a web page to provide information on segments (or clips) within a specific video.
You can also use the seek markup. With this markup, Google is able to utilize machine learning to perform a deeper analysis of your video content and decide which are the most relevant segments for you.
These two new Schema markups can be powerful tools for displaying your website’s video in the SERPs.
John Mueller’s Video Schema Markup Announcement:
Both approaches work similarly and are supported by Google search. In addition to helping users find videos, search now allows users to directly skip to important moments in a video, making it quicker and easier for users to access your content.
To enable these features, we plan to support two types of markup. First, there’s clip markup. With this structured data markup a web page can provide information on segments or clips within a video. These segments can then be shown directly in the search results, making it easier for users to go right to a part of a video.
It doesn’t take much to do this. You just need to provide a textual tag, a starting time and a URL that goes directly to that timestamp, then Google search will be able to show those videos appropriately. But what if you can’t easily list the segment information for all of your hosted videos? For example, perhaps many people are using your website to host videos on their own. Well, for these cases, you can soon use SQL markup.
With this markup, Google can use machine learning to analyze your video content and automatically determine relevant segments for you. All you have to do is tell us how to link to an arbitrary timestamp within the video hosted on your pages. And we’ll do the rest. It’s magical.
To enable this feature, you seek structured data on those pages so that we know how to link to parts appropriately. There’s more about this feature, and its current status in our search developer documentation. At the time of recording, it’s still in a pilot, but we hope to make it generally available in the near future.”
How Does the New Video Schema Markup Work?
Google’s own developer documentation has a helpful guide on how to implement video Schema markup using the new clip and seek markups.
Google mentions some of the following best practices in their guide. We’re not going to repeat the entire guide, but we felt it was worth mentioning a few things.
Video Schema Markup Best Practices
Video Schema markup best practices are important because they help prevent spammers from taking advantage of shady tactics to gain better visibility in the SERPs.
Google explains some of the following best practices, which help aid in crawling, indexing and ranking of your videos:
Help Google Find Your Videos
- Make sure that each video is available on a public web page where users can watch the video. Make sure that the page isn’t blocked by robots.txt or noindex metadata; this ensures that Google can find and index your page.
- Include your video in an appropriate HTML tag. Google can more easily identify a video on your page when there’s an HTML tag around it, for example: <video>, <embed>, <iframe>, or <object>.
- Submit a video sitemap to make it even easier for Google to find your videos.
- To test and submit sitemaps, first add and verify your site in Search Console. Make sure that you verify both the site that contains the sitemap and all of the sites referenced in the sitemap.
- Test and submit your sitemap in the Search Console Sitemaps tool or using the Search Console API.
- Ensure that the page doesn’t require complex user actions or specific URL fragments to load, or Google might not find your videos.
- Don’t lazy-load primary content upon user interaction. Googlebot may not find content that requires user interactions to load (for example, swiping, clicking, or typing). Make sure Google can see lazy-loaded content.
- If you are using overly complicated JavaScript to embed video objects from within JavaScript only under certain circumstances, then it’s also possible that Google won’t correctly index your videos.
- URLs for content or landing pages that require fragment identifiers are not supported.
- Make sure that your videos are visible and easy to find on your video pages. We recommend using a standalone page for each video with a descriptive title or description unique to each individual video. Videos should be prominent on the page and should not be hidden or difficult to find.
Be sure to review Google’s developer best practices documentation to ensure that you have implemented them to the best of your abilities on your site.
For more on how to use videos to skyrocket your SEO, you can read our other article that we have dedicated to making YouTube’s algorithm work for you.
What Does the New Schema Markup Mean for You?
Google recently launched brand new video search results in March, which allow for detailed review of certain video content as they are displayed in the SERPs.
Instead of a video carousel, some videos show up as a Video Key Moments snippet:
The new Schema markup allows you to markup videos on your site with specific clip and seek functionality for the SERPs.
It will give you greater opportunities to appear in these types of snippets.
Use The New Schema Markup to Level up Your SEO
The new types of Schema markup are yet another way to help you increase the results of your SEO efforts.
When you publish videos with this markup that targets specific types of queries, you can eventually achieve higher rankings for keywords that have substantial search volume.
In addition to organic rankings for your video page (if desired), you can show up in the coveted video snippets as well.
Now that you’re armed with this information, how do you plan on implementing the new video Schema markup?
Image credits
Screenshots by author / May 2021
