Google have designed these new reports to help website owners and SEOs to find out what they need to do to improve their video content to get better results. Today, Google announced their two new tools which they stated are “to help you understand your videos’ performance in Search and identify opportunities to improve your video markup”.
Which new tools have Google introduced?
Video Enhancement Report
This new report is available for websites that use structured data to annotate videos, it displays errors and warnings to help you to solve any issues. You can then use the report to identify whether the issues have been effectively resolved by re-crawling the pages you have updated.
Video Appearances in Performance Report
This is an extension of the existing performance report, to allow you to see the performance of videos in the main search results and by using the Discover option, as opposed to just within the Videos tab.
How to optimise your video for Search
Video SEO is critical to your website’s performance, so understanding what works well should be one of your priorities for your 2020 content strategy. Here are some tips on how you can get your videos to perform well in Search:
Include a transcript
Providing a transcript to go with your video ensures that it is more accessible, which is exactly what Google wants to see. It also provides additional text content that will help you to rank for queries that relate to your transcript content.
Use strong titles and descriptions
Creating an enticing title and meta description, using the right keywords is really important in the ranking of videos. It is worth spending some extra time to get your titles and descriptions as engaging as possible.
Focus on mobile viewing
The majority of people that will view your video will be using their mobiles to do so. Therefore, you must make sure that your website and video is mobile friendly.
Choose a great thumbnail
Having an eye-catching thumbnail will ensure you get more clicks, so make sure that yours is colourful and engaging, as well as being relevant to your video’s content.
Stay up to date with SEO updates
Keeping your content fresh and adding new content is crucial for SEO but it is also important to keep an eye on any search engine updates to algorithms, so that you can adapt to any changes that are implemented that negatively affect the ranking.
Video content can often take longer to create than other types of content, so understanding algorithm changes will help you to react quicker, therefore reducing the negative impact on your website.