Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After going through this module, you will understand the use of video content and how it can help in improving Google News rankings and help content appear in the Top Stories section. You will also learn the role of video content in improving click-through rates (CTRs).
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Searches are increasingly becoming more visual. This means image and video searches today constitute a large percentage of total searches. There is a reason why YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google.
In 2022, internet video traffic is predicted to make up for more than 82% of consumer internet traffic (PDF download), which is 15 times higher than what it was in 2017.
Video content matters to SEO because Google now increasingly shows video results in response to search queries. In the example below, we see that Google shows videos in the SERPs after the top few organic posts.
However, for certain queries, Google shows videos at the top of the search results, ahead of text content. For instance, in the search query below, we can see that Google pulls up a video as the number one search result.
And it isn’t just How To videos for which videos are appearing at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). In several other niches, search queries are bringing up videos ahead of text content.
In the example below, we can once again see videos outranking text pages in SERPs.
Video is a powerful tool and is an important aspect of SEO strategy. Here are some of the benefits of embedding video in your content.
Google News shows stories from trusted publishers by employing algorithms to analyze several factors. Some of the major factors that contribute to the rankings are:
Google is now increasingly showing video content in Google News along with text. For instance, searching for news about the US Midterm elections also shows up video results along with text-based content.
Before you submit your videos to Google for consideration, keep in mind the following guidelines:
Videos published on YouTube can feature chapters that allow a user to skip directly to the section that contains an answer to their search query. Publishers can add these timestamps into the video’s description, allowing them to target keywords and potentially show up in search results for different queries.
The below image shows the power of these timestamps in action.
Publishers can either use YouTube’s automatic chapters function or add chapters manually, which overrides the first option.
To add automatic video chapters, follow these steps:
It’s important to note that when adding your own timestamps your video should have at least three chapters, each should be at least 10 seconds long and the first should start at 00:00.
Follow these steps to add your own chapters:
If you’re hosting the video on your own site and not on YouTube, you can enable chapters by using either the Clip structured data or SeekToAction structured data. The former allows you to pinpoint the start and end of each segment as well as its label, while the latter helps Google automatically identify these segments.
Video thumbnails appear on the left as part of search results related to your query. These thumbnails can either contain links to YouTube videos or the videos embedded on a publisher’s website.
The thumbnail image is the first thing users notice about your video, so it’s important to ensure that it’s eye-catching and relevant to your video’s content.
For example, we see below instances of catchy thumbnails with the relevant keywords and text.
Top Stories appear on the Google search page when a user enters a news-oriented search query. Google algorithms determine which images, videos or stories emerge as Top Stories. Embedding videos that contain relevant keywords in the video title, description and time stamps can help you reach your target audience.
For example, when we Google the keyword “UFC”, we see that the three out of four search results in Top Stories are videos.
The following high priority points should help publishers create compelling videos that help drive more views, boost search rankings and enhance user experience (UX).
Before we talk about video rich snippets, let’s first consider what a SERP snippet is.
A plain snippet is the information that is shown when the page is listed in a SERP and includes:
A rich snippet contains extra information such as image, reviews, time taken to complete the activity, location and more.
A rich snippet is implemented using structured data markup in the page’s HTML code to help search engines more easily classify and display a page’s contents. Users see this as the detailed information shown in SERPs.
A video rich snippet contains video duration, thumbnail and details such as upload date and channel/publisher, in addition to the URL, title and description. These snippets allow you to differentiate your content in the SERPs.
Add structured data to your web page source code to ensure that rich snippets are visible on SERPs.
Structured data consists of:
Use Google Structured Data Markup helper to generate the markup code and add the structured data to your page source code yourself if you are good at coding.
1. Open the Google Structured Data Markup helper tool
2. Select website or email option based on where your snippet will appear. Select data type and paste the URL.
3. Once you click on Start Tagging, it’ll open the page in “Tag Data” view.
4. Choose elements by highlighting the content.
5. Select the relevant label from the list. Add elements such as product name, price, image, description, etc.
6. The markup tool will add tags on the right for the elements you have selected.
7. When you’re ready, click on Create HTML. The tool will generate the JSON-LD or microdata code.
8. Copy or download the code and add it to your source page source code. Add the structured data markup between <head> tags.
You can also add rich snippets by using plugins offered by CMSs such as WordPress to implement the structured data.
All In One Schema Rich Snippets is a popular plugin for adding rich snippets to your WordPress page.
Creating high-quality video content is paramount but most people tend to overlook the importance of providing the right backend information that helps crawlers understand, categorize and prioritize videos.
Since Google owns YouTube, videos hosted on YouTube often end up at the top of the video tab in SERPs. It works to your advantage if you host your videos on YouTube. Google bots can crawl YouTube embeds or MP4 videos in the content so it’s vital that you don’t forget the technical details. To ensure your videos rank higher, do the following:
The metadata contains key details about a video that make it easier for crawlers to search. There are primarily two types of metadata:
Steps to add/update video metadata on YouTube are listed below.
When a reader clicks on the video, they are redirected to the video landing page. We’d advise embedding the video instead of simply putting a link to the video on your page.
Embedding a video keeps the readers on your page, enhances user experience and helps boost your SERP rankings. Ensure you only embed videos that are relevant to your page’s content.
Here’s how to embed a video on your page.
We’ve already talked about the benefits of embedding videos and important factors to keep in mind when using video content. In this section, we’ll cover Google’s video best practices to help optimize your videos.
Accessibility is a major factor for videos to perform well. With this in mind, Google has drawn together a list of best practices that are geared towards helping the search engine find and index your content.
Google has a complete list of the necessary video sitemap tags as well as guidelines around creating and submitting a sitemap.
An important step is to ensure that Google can fetch your video files to figure out the video content and enable key moments and video preview features.
The video features you can use for your video content are listed below.
This feature shows a moving preview of the video when you hover over the video thumbnail. This gives the viewer an idea about what’s in the actual video. To enable this feature, make sure that Google is allowed to fetch the video files and use the max-video-preview robots meta tag to set the preview duration.
These are the video timestamps and chapters we discussed above.
As the name suggests, this video feature allows you to put a red LIVE badge that appears in SERPs.
Use BroadcastEvent structured data for live streaming videos.
You can easily remove your video page from the SERPs by doing one of the following:
Restricting the video for a particular location can be done by using either of the following methods:
While there are several advantages associated with video content, there are also certain pitfalls you must avoid to create interactive and engaging video content.
As with written content, there is now a glut of video content on the internet. This means it is important to create content that can hold users’ attention.
Publishers often put too much information in a video resulting in long runtimes. While it’s important to create informative videos, the duration of videos plays a vital role in retaining viewers in an era of short attention spans. This is evident from the fact that only 25% of viewers (PDF download) will finish a business video if it runs for more than 20 minutes.
To ensure that a viewer watches the video until the end, it is better to create multiple short videos than a comprehensive video that fails to capture viewer interest.
While shorter videos are preferred by viewers, it is the content that matters. A great video is one that gives the user all the information they want without overdoing it. By overwhelming the users with details, you discourage them from staying with the video till the end.
It is better to make a series of short videos about a particular product or service to keep the viewers engaged till the end.
CNN is a multinational news company that serves viewers across the world. It has created a dedicated page for video news that allows consumers to catch up on the latest news around the world.
In the screenshot below, you can see how the CNN video news homepage appears to users.
A trending news video is shown at the top of the page based on the user’s location along with a short description of the content. The featured video is embedded on the page and plays automatically when you open the site.
Now, when you scroll down, you’ll see a wide variety of news videos based on different fields ranging from politics to sports. Notice the customized thumbnails, descriptive titles and duration of these short videos that help users understand and decide which videos to click on.
Once you click on a video from the list, it redirects to a new page and plays the selected video. The new page shows a list of the latest video thumbnails on the right along with run time and descriptive titles.
The optimized videos on CNN news are likely to be ranked higher because of:
Grand Prix 247 is a Formula 1 sports site that features videos related to the latest F1 news, interviews, opinions, reports, etc.
A standout feature of the site is the fact that it has integrated video content into its news posts.
Once you click on a news item on the homepage, it will redirect you to a page that contains a strategically placed featured video in the center, with a list of videos on the right. The Primis video discovery platform powers these videos, which are embedded on the page. Primis’ video player shows the following information to viewers:
Grandprix247 showcases how to make users stay on the page for longer by using video content. Here are some of the key factors:
The above examples show how optimizing videos and sticking to best practices results in better UX and can help you climb up in SERP rankings.
Having read this module, you should now understand the importance of including video content and how it can help boost SEO rankings and drive more people to your website.
You should be able to avoid the common pitfalls mentioned and follow the best practices and guidelines listed to improve your site’s visibility using video content.
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