[FAQ]

I’ve been creating a fair few videos for my blog posts recently, embedding them directly onto the page. The thing is, they only seem to live on my website.

When I search for topics my competitors cover, I sometimes see their videos pop up right there in the search results, with a little thumbnail and everything. It looks brilliant and must drive a lot of traffic. My pages show up, but only as a standard blue link.

Is there some trick to this? I’ve spent ages making sure the videos are good quality, but it feels like I’m missing a crucial step to get Google to actually recognise them as videos.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Jeff Bullas]

That’s an excellent goal to have, as video results can dramatically improve your click-through rate.

Short Answer: To get your videos to appear in search results, you need to embed Video Schema Markup—a specific type of text code—on your page and submit a video sitemap to Google.

You’re essentially providing a detailed, machine-readable summary of your video content directly to the search engine.

The process involves giving Google explicit information about your video content. First, the most crucial step is adding Video Schema markup to the text of your webpage; this code describes your video’s title, duration, and provides a direct URL to a compelling thumbnail image. Second, that thumbnail image itself is vital, as it’s the visual advertisement for your video in the search results and needs to be high-quality to entice clicks. Third, you should create and submit a video sitemap, which is a specific text file listing all your video URLs, to help Google discover and index your video content more efficiently. It’s important to only do this for pages where the video is a primary piece of content, not a minor element, and ensure your descriptive text in the schema is accurate and not misleading.

Cheers,
Jeff

• This reply was modified 2 months ago by Neil Anthony.
• This reply was modified 2 months ago by Neil Anthony.

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