Video is an important and growing medium used to consume information online, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to find useful and interesting videos on Google. Today, we’re introducing two new tools to help you understand your videos’ performance in Search and identify opportunities to improve your video markup.
Mark up your video content with structured data to make Google Search an entry point for discovering and watching videos. You can provide details such as the description, thumbnail URL, upload date, and duration by marking up your video with VideoObject. You can also add additional structured data to your VideoObject to enable the following video enhancements:
- Video Carousel: Mark up video gallery pages (a page with a list of videos) using
ItemListstructured data. - Video Segments: Mark important segments in your video with
Clipstructured data, which enables users to quickly navigate to specific points in a video.
There are three main ways people can see videos on Google Search today: on the main Search page; on the videos Search tab; and in Discover:
Video Enhancement Report
Structured data can help search engines understand when videos appear on a page, so they can be displayed with a rich visual treatment, including accurate information on a video’s duration, upload date, and other metadata, as well as previews. This in turn helps users better understand what they’ll find in your video before they click.
A new report for “Videos” is now available in Search Console for sites that use structured data to annotate videos. The report allows you to see any errors and warnings for markup implemented on your site. When you fix an issue, you can use the report to validate if it was resolved by re-crawling your affected pages. Learn more about the rich result status reports.
Video Appearances in Performance Report
The Search Console performance report already includes an option to see the performance of your video tab search results (type = video). We are excited to share that we’ve extended our support for videos, so you can now also see the performance of your videos in the main Search results tab (type = web) and in Discover using the new “Videos” appearance. Content can appear with the video appearance if your page uses VideoObject structured data, or if Google uses other signals to detect that there is a video on the page.
These new tools should make it easier to understand how your videos perform on Search and to identify and fix video issues. We also recommend you follow these video best practices. If you have any questions, be sure to post in our forum.