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Effective Video Indexing Strategies For SEO

Problem

I encountered an issue while working on a Next.js website with video pages: none of these video pages were being indexed by Google. I was looking for some solution where I could explicitly let the crawler know that some pages were clearly video pages. I finally came across video structured data.

When you add video structured data to your video pages, your search results will stand out more clearly in the search results. Remember that your ultimate goal from having an SEO strategy is to drive traffic from search engines. Your video pages will show up more prominently in search engine results since they contain a video thumbnail.

In the above screenshot, even though the video result is ranked below the text result, the video result stands out more.

Solution

You can embed video metadata into your page source as a broader video SEO strategy.

If you are using Next.js you can inject video structured data onto your video pages using the next/head component.

Here is the code that I am using to generate video structured data for each page with a video:

import Head from 'next/head';

function MyVideoPage() {
  const structuredData = {
    __html: `{
        "@context": "https://schema.org/",
        "@type": "VideoObject",
        "name": "Watch These Llamas Spitting",
        "description": "Llamas spitting at each other",
        "uploadDate": "2022-12-15",
        "thumbnailUrl": ["<link-to-your-thumbnail>"],
        "contentUrl": "<link-to-your-video>",
        "duration": "PT1M30S"
      }
    `,
  };
  return (
    <Head>
      <script
        type="application/ld+json"
        dangerouslySetInnerHTML={structuredData}
        key="video-jsonld"
      />
    </Head>
  );
}

You can verify your video structured data is correct by using Google's Rich Results Test and entering in your video page URL.

Why Does This Work?

I first heard about the importance of structured data on the Search Off the Record podcast, which is Google's own podcast about SEO. This is one of the best resources for SEO information because it's hosted by the Search Relations team at Google, who have the inside knowledge about how Google decides to crawl and index different pages.

I believe video structured data provides a very strong signal for Google to determine whether a page is a video page, and it should be part of a strong video SEO strategy. It can be ambiguous whether a video is the primary content on a page, or whether certain text and video on a page are related to each other. If a video page can explicitly say "here's my video", it can make it a lot easier to determine that the main content on a page is the video. I would strongly recommend that everyone uses this as part of a video SEO best practice.