If your company videos are hosted on YouTube, they are naturally indexed and receive search traffic. But what about videos on your website pages hosted on services like Wistia, Vidyard, or Vimeo? How are these pages ranked and receive traffic?
Google Search Console has a new video page indexing report that provides insight into the pages it knows about having a video embedded. This way, you can better optimize your pages to receive additional search traffic for videos not hosted on YouTube.
Video SEO is an excellent opportunity because Google includes video results in many search result pages and often gets a higher click-through rate than text-based articles.
In this video, I explain how to find the video indexing report inside Google Search Console and how to fix video indexing issues found on your site. I also provide some recommendations on how you can optimize your site to gain more search traffic for your videos.
Important Note: One thing I have noticed that helps every time you embed a video from YouTube or Wistia to also include video object schema. This helps search engines know exactly what the video is about in a quick digestible format. You can use this online video object schema tool.
Google could not determine the prominent video on the page.
The video isn’t “prominent” on the page, or is less prominent or suitable for indexing than another video on the page. In the video above I demonstrate how you can make your videos more prominent so that they can be indexed as video pages. It might require creating a new page that has a layout specifically for watching a video.
Other reasons why your video pages might not be indexed
- The containing page is not indexed.
- The video doesn’t follow all the video indexing guidelines.
- The video isn’t findable by Google.
- Another video on the page was more suitable for indexing.
- Google couldn’t retrieve the thumbnail supplied or generate a thumbnail.
- Google couldn’t generate the required information for the video for some reason.
Read official documentation for ways to correct some of these issues.
Links I mentioned in this video
- Google Blog Announcing Video Indexing Report
- Video indexing report docs
- Search Engine Land Article
- Free Guide – 5 Ways to Improve Your Website
Video Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:28 Google Search Console New Video Indexing Report
0:55 How to Fix Google Could Not Determine the Prominent Video on the Page
1:20 What is Google Looking for?
2:00 Example of an Indexed Video Page
2:25 How it Looks in Google Search
2:55 Opportunity for More Search Traffic
3:50 How to Leverage This for SEO
4:20 Free Guide: 5 Ways to Improve Your Website ►► https://bootstrapcreative.com/resourc…
Create a Video XML Sitemap for WordPress
- If you only embed YouTube videos https://wordpress.org/plugins/youtube-video-sitemap-generator/
- If you embed youtube wistia and vimeo https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/video-seo/
