Tech SEO for Video Content: Make it Crawl and Let it Index

In today’s digital world, videos take the crown as the most captivating way to keep users hooked in the realm of digital marketing.

Sure, videos can be a powerful tool for SEO, but there’s a catch – they need to be crawlable and fit for indexation.

In this post, I’m going to guide you through the ins and outs of implementing technical SEO strategies for video content, including a solid approach to tracking and monitoring video performances.

Why?

Because I want to help you think forward and anticipate your client requests over a rise in crawling or indexation issues with videos.

📚TL;DR

This section is for lazy readers.

Still, I suggest reading the entire blog post as it was crafted with care, and you might discover valuable tips for implementing your video optimizations.

• Make videos accessible to search engines and eligible for indexation.
• Optimizing video content brings benefits such as increased audience reach, enhanced brand reputation, and the ability to dominate specific SERPs with diverse multimedia formats.
• To help Google find and index your videos, check for noindex tags and robots.txt blocks, use proper HTML tags, and ensure your videos are hosted on stable URLs.

💡Why Tech SEO Matters for Video Content

In the vast digital landscape, where visual engagement is king, the importance of using technical SEO strategies for video content cannot be stressed enough.

While crafting compelling videos is crucial, making the most out of basics and nitty-gritty SEO techniques can be very efficient in helping search engines see and index your pages with videos.

Importance of Video SEO

As anticipated, video SEO isn’t just about creating captivating content, but it’s about optimising multi-media content for search engines.

As Generation Z shifts towards alternative search channels such as TikTok and YouTube, your digital strategy should not disregard the opportunity to broaden the range of MOFU (Middle of the Funnel) touchpoints.

Ensuring that your audience can tap into the information conveyed in videos is key to connecting the dots in your omnichannel digital strategy.

Benefits of Optimizing Video Content

Optimizing video content brings forth a myriad of benefits that extend beyond visibility.

As Google MUM is fully in control of the information retrieval process, SERPs are becoming increasingly diverse as they cater to other media types than just text.

In fact, videos appear in multiple formats on social (videos posted on Facebook or TikTok) and can rank for multiple positions in the same SERPs at the same time.

For example, Peppa Pig’s dancing extravaganza can rank on Google for multiple social media platforms.

But videos can rank with the likes of different SERP features such as top carousels and YouTube video URLs altogether.

In simple terms, here are the benefits of optimizing pages with videos:

1. Increased audience reach through improved user engagement
2. Enhanced brand reputation
3. SEO advantages from securing a spot in Google’s Knowledge Graph and establishing your website as a valuable entity
4. Dominate specific SERPs by aligning your content strategy with various multimedia formats.
5. Simplify decision-making for prospects navigating the “Messy Middle” of your MOFU funnel stage.

Self-hosted vs YouTube-embedded videos

Did you see Peppa Pig’s YouTube or TikTok videos consistently chipping away top rankings to the detriment of proprietary sources?

In my experience, embedding YouTube videos may not necessarily get more backlinks, but it could improve rankings. However, it’s important to note that using a third-party service to embed videos leaves your website vulnerable to security breaches or spam.

On the flip side, hosting your videos may attract more backlinks, but it might not ensure higher rankings.

While it promises increased security and full ownership for easy content access, self-hosting your videos can be challenging. It involves setting up efficient web hosting and a CDN to ensure your website has enough bandwidth for resource downloads without overloading.

I don’t think there’s an ideal solution as it depends on the type of website and especially the target industry.

Undoubtedly, a good riddle to unravel before getting started your video SEO action plan.

🛠Technical SEO Strategies for Video Content

It may sound banal, but it’s all about making videos on your website readily accessible to search engines and ensuring they capture the attention of web crawlers, putting them in the driver’s seat of indexation.

In fact, there are two strategies I’ll be covering for the rest of the article:

Help Google Find Your Videos. Ensuring optimal visibility for your website’s videos on Google involves a series of crucial checks.
Start by confirming there are no noindex meta tags and ensuring that the pages housing your videos aren’t blocked in the robots.txt file. Proper HTML tags, including video, embed, iframe, and object, play a pivotal role in signalling the relevance of your video content to search engines.

Let Google Index your Video. The next crucial step is making sure videos are eligible for indexation. This involves various checks, from confirming stable hosting URLs to addressing issues flagged by the Search Console. This part will be covered more in-depth by the end of the article.

💡 If you’re into the strategic facet of SEO, do check out a full guide to approach an SEO market-oriented analysis using Python

🔦Help Google find your videos

When it comes to ensuring that Google can find and crawl your videos on your website, there are some essential checks to perform.

Check for Noindex Tags and Robots.txt Blocks

Start with the basics and test your pages with videos to make sure they don’t have a noindex meta tag.

Plus, do verify that these pages are not blocked in your site’s robots.txt file. If they are, Google won’t be able to crawl them.

Verify Proper HTML Tags

Improper or not supported HTML tags will stop search engines from crawling pages with videos

Just like images, videos should be enclosed in a dedicated <video> HTML attribute followed by the src= tag that will call up the actual video URL.

Here is an example of what you want to avoid in your HTML, that is using a <source> attribute instead of the <video> tag.

<video 

<video controls>

<source src=“/content/ex/asia/brand-example-video.mp4” type=“video/mp4”>

<video/>

Ensure your videos are enclosed within the appropriate HTML tags, such as:

• <video src=' '>
• <embed src=' '>
• <iframe src=' '>
• <object>

Avoid OnClick and OnScrolling Events

Googlebot crawls, it doesn’t stomp on the ground. Therefore, it is not able to follow events generated by any kind of user interaction such as clicks and scrolling.

The old advice of steering away from JavaScript-powered internal links also applies when you have a page with videos on it. This is why you have to inspect whether the page requires complex user actions or specific URL fragments to load.

Otherwise, Google might not find your videos.

Here are 3 key questions you should definitely ask if you want search engines to crawl your videos efficiently.

1️⃣ Is loading="lazy" applied to primary content that requires user interaction (clicking, swiping)?

There may be cases where the issue affects a custom player button loading right after the entire video thumbnail on the page (see below). Other than causing a poor user experience, this practice is not ideal as search engines may never be able to find the button.

If there is no button, the video doesn’t load up – alas search bots will assume that that thing they crawled is everything but a video.

2️⃣ Does the website use overly complicated JavaScript to embed video objects?

If you are using overly complicated JavaScript to embed video objects, then it’s also possible that Google won’t correctly index your videos.

3️⃣Are URL fragment identifiers (#) appended to URL strings?

URLs for content or landing pages that require fragment identifiers are not supported for indexation.

The easiest way to check it out is to open a sample page with videos and fire up the Element tab in the Chrome dev.tool to get your hands dirty with the rendered code.

Videos are located within the viewport

Videos falling outside the viewport may be hard to discover for search engines as they may be required to scroll on a page to fetch the video.​

The issue may occur due to burying videos under blocks of text preventing the browser from correctly building the DOM.​

Use the URL inspection tool to get a feeling of the issue and then consider adjusting the video’s height and width and repositioning the video above the fold to make it easier for Googlebot to fetch it.

How to Fix this issue?

• Determine the height and width for each video using basic HTML tags (i.e. height=, width=)​
• Ensure that your videos are placed high up on the page and are responsive to different screen sizes.​
• Use lazy loading to defer the loading of videos until needed.​

Web hosting and CDN

A video page may be indexed and eligible to appear on Google, but Google needs to fetch the video file itself to understand the video contents and enable features like video previews and key moments.

The very first requirement for Google to be able to access your video is that it can be found at the host service. If it’s not, you will likely confront the following status on your Search Console

The video host page and the server streaming the actual video must rely on the necessary amount of bandwidth to be crawled. This means that if your page contains an embedded video from a third-party, both your website and the third-party service need to have the capacity to handle the server load.

Efficient web hosting can not only improve site speed but also provide an increase in the available bandwidth to download videos from the server.

In the same context, be sure that your CDN is not inadvertently blocking your website from all search engines.

If not configured correctly, CDNs may block search engines, preventing them from accessing and indexing video content.

🌟Let Google Index your Videos

Once you’ve figured out how to help Google locate your videos, it’s pivotal to make them indexed. Here are a few checks to perform:

Video Formatting

Video file names with special characters and underscores may discourage search engines from indexing them.

Likewise, pages with videos that are incorrectly formatted will not be indexed or will have some components ignored for indexation (e.g..swf)

Ensure videos are uploaded with:

•Descriptivefilenames reflecting the content of the video.

•Supported file format:

3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, DivX, M2V, M3U, M3U8, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGV, QVT, RAM, RM, VOB, WebM, WMV, and XAP.

Structured Data

Structured data can help search engines understand better your content so that it makes it easier to crawl and index. Although there are many schema properties available for video pages, the approach to structured data optimization doesn’t vary from the standards.

You can quickly streamline the audit for structured data with Python as suggested in this tutorial.

In fact, you should always ensure that any information you provide is consistent with the actual video content.

When you explicitly provide instructions or convey relevant information to your audience, Google can better understand the content in your video and provide an enhanced experience to help learners find the right content.

This is especially true when it comes to learning-specific information with structured data, such as the educational level, concepts, and skills covered in the video.

Also, using unique thumbnails, titles, and descriptions for each video remains critical. To debug, head to a page template, inspect the DOM from the Chrome dev.tool, and enter the following snippet in the Source tab

var videoScripts = document.querySelectorAll("script[type='application/ld+json']");
var videoSchemas = [];

videoScripts.forEach(function(script) {
  try {
    // Parse the JSON content of the script
    var videoObject = JSON.parse(script.textContent);

    // Check if the videoObject has the @type 'VideoObject'
    if (videoObject['@type'] === 'VideoObject') {
      // Add the videoObject to the videoSchemas array
      videoSchemas.push(videoObject);
    }
  } catch (error) {
    // Handle JSON parsing errors here if needed
    console.error("Error parsing JSON:", error);
  }
});

console.log(videoSchemas);

This chunk of vanilla JavaScript will return the @VideoObject schema markup – if available on the page.

💡 PRO TIP

Google has recently clarified the timezone and crawling practices of Googlebot suggesting to align the timezone to the uploadDate property with the time based on the website geography. Mind that if no timezone is specified, Googlebot would pick the US timezone by default

Video Sitemaps

Schema mark-up can be helpful but what if your website is all over videos?

Assuming you’re a publisher, structured data may not be enough to signal search engines about the underlying importance of videos on your site.

In this case, you might need to create a dedicated XML video sitemap folder to help Google discover your videos.

Sky News hosts a very educated video sitemap with all the required tags to ensure web crawlers can pass the URLs to the rendering queue prior to indexation.

Here is an overview of the mandatory tag your video sitemap must contain:

Element	Description
<video:video>	The parent element for all information about a single video on the page specified by the <loc> tag. You can include multiple <video:video> tags nested in the <loc> tag, one for each video on the hosting page.
<video:thumbnail_loc>	A URL pointing to the video thumbnail image file.
<video:title>	The title of the video.
<video:description>	A description of the video.
<video:content_loc>	This attribute is used to include one URL pointing to the actual video media file and it must not be the same as the URL in the parent <loc> tag. This is the equivalent of VideoObject.contentUrl in structured data.
<video:player_loc>	This value is used as an alternative of video:content_loc for Vimeo, YouTube, and other video hosting platforms that allow embedding videos through iframe videos. Usually, this is the information in the src attribute of an <embed> tag and corresponds to the VideoObject.embedUrl in structured data.

An important thing to note before moving on is that you should include either the <video:content_loc> or <video:player_loc> tag to specify the URL of your actual video media file.

Google recommends using <video:content_loc> as it’s the preferred method. However, if <video:content_loc> is not available, you can use <video:player_loc> as an alternative.

💡BONUS READ

Get your hands dirty and discover how to streamline an XML sitemap audit with Python in this tutorial

Video is the Main Content

In a recent note, Google announced that video thumbnails on the main Google Search results page will be showcased only when the video is the main content of a page.

For a page with videos to obtain rich results on the SERP, this means videos must be the main content of the page, ideally located in the most prominent position or renderable area.

To put it simply, if your video complements other content and is not the focus of the page, then it’s unlikely it will show up in the search results.

🔔 IMPORTANT NOTE

“Video is not the main content” is a flag indicating a supplementary video on a page is not indexed, therefore will not gain any video rich results.
A page with videos may be still indexed but may not rank in search results with a video rich result.

A few years ago, if you added a YouTube video to your article, it had a chance to appear in the Video tab on Google. But now, if the video isn’t the main content of the page like on YouTube, the page won’t show up in video carousels or the Video tab.

In fact, when you search for something and click on the “Video” tab, you’ll only see YouTube videos tagging along with a bunch of TikTok results.

Now, you have two options to optimize your videos for search:

• Optimize your videos directly on YouTube instead of just focusing on SEO for a page with videos.
• Dedicate pages with only video content to match up with video-oriented search queries.

Add a Transcript

Adding a transcript improves the way language is presented on the webpage. This is especially beneficial in the age of AI, where there is a significant amount of machine-generated content being produced.

Providing a transcript for your videos can help improve your site’s content. This, in turn, can enhance your site’s visibility on Google and indicate that the content is created by knowledgeable individuals. It may also contribute to your site’s E-E-A-T signals.

Rich Results and Key Features

Besides, there are several features that can enhance the look of your videos to be eligible for rich results. These include key moments, live badges, titles, and video transcripts. These are on-page requirements that you should consider when optimizing your video for SEO.

One of the most luring is the key moments feature due to the potential to clutter the SERPs and max up CTR.

Key moments are features that help users navigate video content like book chapters.

Google Search automatically detects these moments, but you can also specify them manually using structured data or YouTube descriptions. For website-hosted videos, there are two methods:

-Using the @Clip schema markup property. Specify the exact start and end point to each segment, and what label to display for each segment. This is supported in all languages where Google Search is available.

– Using the SeekToAction structured data. Tell Google where timestamps typically go in your URL structure, so that Google can automatically identify key moments and link users to those points within the video. For YouTube videos, you can specify timestamps and labels.

💡 BONUS READ

To get a broader understanding of how Google NLP understand search queries, have a look at some of the Top Google Patents for Search Query Interpretation

🔝The Recipe for the Best SEO-friendly Video

It is quite obvious that the best videos on a website should load without the need for post-JavaScript injection.

This includes any attribute designed to frame the thumbnail images within the video object frame or reposition the video itself for optimal rendering on the page.

A website without JavaScript might seem like a cherry cake without its cherry these days. However, in an ideal world, here is an example of a perfectly crawlable and indexable video rooted in plain HTML.

📐How to Measure Video Indexation and Performance

Once you’re all set with the correct configuration to ensure your videos are accessible and eligible for indexation, the next step is to thoroughly track and monitor performance in the wild.

You can use the video indexing report in Google Search Console to monitor potential backfires with the tech setup. In addition, you can use the links report to glare insights into backlinks acquired by your video pages.

Third-party services are also useful to help you track organic performance for your videos. For example, SEMRush allows you to measure the SERP Feature growth.

To do so, you will have to dive into the Organic Research section and toggle the options for Short Video and Video Carousels rich results.

💡 BONUS READ

Find out how to debug Broken Backlinks on 4xx Pages with Python

Make it Crawl and Let it Index

Embedding videos on your pages enables you to cater to diverse experiences for your audience. Having high-quality textual content, images, and videos on a page signals to Google a much richer experience than less diversified content.

However, it must be done correctly; otherwise, you risk missing so many opportunities that could guide your prospects further down the funnel.

By following these steps, you can help Google discover and index videos from your website to make sure your video content is optimized for search engine visibility and user experience.

FAQ