Many video content creators aren’t aware of the opportunities they have by using their content in combination with Google Rich results.
One of those examples is Video content and VideoObject structured data.
Let’s assume that you are a video content creator on YouTube. Your videos get automatically crawled and indexed in Google Search. You are happy about it because you are getting views from people who search for the topics you’re filming about.
What if I tell you that your videos could show up more than once, with different titles and cover images. Crazy, right? Let’s see how to add it and what are benefits.
Experiment With VideoObject (Example)
As you can see from the screenshot above, I have two pieces of content on the top of the search results for video. The first link is my YouTube video, and the second one is my blog post that embeds this video and uses VideoObject structured data.
Benefits Of Using VideoObject Structured data
You are probably thinking “What’s the benefit by using it this way?”
By using VideoObject structured data on your pages you get:
- More visibility in Video results (more clicks to your pages or videos, more page views, and more money)
- Possibility to have different titles and cover images for the same video (to test which performs better for example)
- Possibility to mark different parts of your video as a Clip (more about this later)
- Possibility to embed the same video in multiple pages and show them all in video results
Google On Using VideoObject Structured data
Google Search adds Rich snippets for video results from YouTube to SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) automatically.
People often asking is it recommended to add schema video markup onsite to get your page with embedded video to rank in SERPs in addition to the YouTube result, or is this redundant?
Short answer is YES!
The more markup is there, schema video, or whatever, the easier it is for search engine to be able to interpret what really matters on a page.
This is exactly what Matt explained in this video on the Google Webmasters channel.
What is a video schema?
Video schema markup is a form of structured data, or code. This code provides search engines with a description of the content in your video, allowing them to better understand and process your content.
What is content url in Video schema?
ContentURL: A URL to the actual video file or YouTube watch link. EmbedURL: This URL points to where the video is hosted, and it helps the search engine in finding it faster. EmbedURL for YouTube is usually youtube.com/embed/<videoId>
How many videoObject is allowed on one page?
In general, there is no limit but Google will always use one prominent video from the page. If Google is not able to decide which video is prominent it will not use any of them. I would suggest to mark only one prominent video per article.
Can I use the same video on multiple pages?
Usually, you can use the same video on multiple pages but for the best SEO results try to limit it on maximum two pages. The first page will be the one you embed video to and second one will be “only video” page.
How can key moments on my video using structured data?
You can mark your video’s key moments by using Clip structured data and SeekToAction structured data. Soon, I will be release Video Schema Generator here to simplify this process for you.
