Video improves SEO by giving your pages extra places to appear in Google, such as video results, Video mode, Google Images and Discover, and it improves engagement by showing visitors in a minute what text takes several paragraphs to explain. Neither happens just by uploading a clip. Google has to be able to find the video, index it and understand what it is about, and the video has to answer a real question.
How does video help a website show up in search?
Google's video documentation lists several surfaces where videos can appear: the main search results page, Video mode, Google Images and Discover. A page with a properly marked-up video can qualify for features that text pages cannot, including:
- Video results with a thumbnail, which stand out in a list of plain text links.
- Video previews, a few seconds of moving preview chosen by Google, if Google is allowed to fetch the video file.
- Key moments, which let people jump to a section of the video, like chapters in a book.
Video also earns links and mentions in its own right. A clear product demo or a how-to that solves a common problem is the kind of material other sites embed and reference, and links help Google discover and assess your pages.
How does video improve engagement?
Some things are simply easier to show than to describe. The formats that work best for business sites are practical ones:
- Product demos that show the product being used, from unboxing to the result.
- How-to and setup videos that answer the questions your support team hears every week.
- Process walk-throughs for services, so a buyer understands what happens after they enquire.
- Customer stories, filmed with the customer's permission, that show a real problem being solved.
Keep videos short and to the point, put the most useful part first, and place the video near the text it supports. Add captions and a transcript. The W3C's accessibility guidance explains that transcripts serve people who are Deaf or hard of hearing and people who take in text more easily than audio, and a transcript also puts the video's words on the page in a form search engines can read.
What does Google need to index a video?
This is where most video SEO fails. Google's best practices set out clear requirements:
- Use standard HTML for the player. Google finds videos in
<video>,<embed>,<iframe>or<object>elements. If JavaScript inserts the video, check it appears in the rendered HTML in Search Console's URL Inspection tool. - Do not hide the video behind a click. Google says not to rely on user actions such as swiping, clicking or typing to load it.
- Give it a watch page. To be eligible for video features, create a dedicated page whose main purpose is that one video, with its own unique title and description. A blog post with an embedded video can still appear as a text result, but it is not a watch page.
- Index the page first. The watch page must be indexed, and performing well in Search, before its video is considered for indexing.
- Provide a thumbnail at a stable URL. Thumbnail links that expire quickly, which some CDNs use, can stop a video being indexed.
- Describe it with structured data or a video sitemap. Google supports VideoObject structured data, video sitemaps and Open Graph tags. Keep the name, description and thumbnail unique for each video and consistent with the video itself.
Google is clear that markup does not guarantee a video feature will appear, but without it you are leaving Google to guess.
Should you host on YouTube or on your own site?
Often both. If you embed a YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook video on your page, Google may index the video on your page and on the platform's own page, and both can appear in video features if they meet the indexing criteria. Google still recommends structured data on your own watch page.
YouTube brings its own audience and search. On YouTube you can add chapters by listing timestamps in the description: the first must start at 00:00, you need at least three in ascending order, and each chapter must be at least 10 seconds long. Google says it will prioritise key moments you set, through structured data or the YouTube description. For short-form ideas, see our notes on what works and what flops on YouTube Shorts.
Hosting the file yourself gives you full control over the page and keeps visitors on your site, but your server, or the streaming service you use, must be able to handle Google's crawling as well as viewers.
What goes wrong with video SEO?
- A gallery page shows ten videos of equal size, so no page is a watch page for any of them.
- Every video has the same title and description, copied from the page.
- The video file or thumbnail is blocked in robots.txt.
- An expiry date in the structured data or sitemap was set in the past by mistake, so the video drops out of video results.
- The video loads only after a visitor clicks a placeholder image.
Search Console's Video indexing report shows which watch pages have indexed videos and why others were not indexed. Check it after you publish. If you would like help planning or optimising video, our social media team, which includes video editors, plans and produces the content and our SEO service handles the markup, watch pages and reporting. You can also run our free site audit to check the pages that host your videos.
Questions people ask about video and SEO
Does adding a video to a page improve its ranking?
Not automatically. Google ranks pages on how well they answer a search. A video that makes the page more useful can help, and a properly indexed video can appear in video results, but a video on a weak page does not fix the page.
Do I need a separate page for every video?
For video features such as video results and key moments, Google recommends a dedicated watch page for each video where it makes sense for your business. The same video can also be embedded on other pages, such as a product page.
Is a YouTube embed enough for SEO?
It can be. Google may index an embedded YouTube video on both your page and on YouTube. Adding VideoObject structured data to your own page and writing a unique title and description for it improves the chances that your page is the one that appears.
How do I know if Google has indexed my videos?
Open the Video indexing report in Search Console. It lists pages where Google found a video and gives the reason when a video was not indexed, such as a missing thumbnail or a video that is not on a watch page.
Further reading
Official guidance on the subject, from the platforms themselves: