RethinkYour.com Podcast



093. Don't Sleep on Embedded Videos

by
info@jewelerwebsites.com

released November 12, 2021
(recorded November 10, 2021) - 52 minutes

Video has become an important part of online marketing and SEO. How you host your videos is just as important as the content within the videos. In this episode of the RethinkYour.com Podcast we’re answering listener email about organizing videos on your website, the different ways to host your videos, and some ideas for good SEO optimization of the videos you embed on your website. Don’t skip or press pause on your screen, good stuff is just ahead.


''

Matthew Perosi
shared 2 links
11/10, 12:38 PM




Audience question:
I've learned a lot from listening to your show. I have a question about something you didn't mention, but I found it on another SEO blog.
I have a question about the video review page on my website...
I ask customers to record video reviews for me. I upload the reviews to my YouTube and include them on a single reviews page on my site. The blog said I should only have 1 video on a page. I have more than 20 videos already. Does that mean I need to have 20 pages of videos? Isn't that too much?
I look forward to hearing your answer.
-Kelly

Google has new guidelines for how to post videos on your website if the content of the video is relevant for your SEO:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/video

On that page, Google explains that, in order for a video to have a benefit for SEO, the video will need it's own page. The structure of that page would have to show the video at the top of the screen, above the fold, with either notes, or a full transcript below the video.
Google has the ability to recognize key moments in your videos. These key moments are points within your video that have relevance to your users. When Google recognized these key moments, they will show them in Google Search results. They appear as a video timeline with a brief description associated with points on the timeline. Sort of like chapters in a video.
Key moments in videos will appear in search results only when the single video is the main content on the page, but not when the video is a secondary content on a page, like a product detail page.

Google looks through your videos to identify key moments automatically. They use speech recognition to analyze the topics being discussed, then they pick a point within the video when you start talking about that topic. They also use character recognition to look for point where you have words appear in the video or when you have a box appear with words to emphasize a statement. This automated ability to identify key moments saved you the time from doing it yourself in your YouTube account for each video.
You can add the time stamps for the key moments to your YouTube descriptions.

Since you mentioned that you have a long page of videos from YouTube, we will assume that you have used the YouTube embedding code to make all the videos appear on that single page. A page like that probably takes a long time to load since those 20 videos each need to be loaded and cued up. You'll want to change your strategy by moving all those videos to their own single page with a description or transcript, and then turn that original page of 20 reviews into a page of thumbnail images with captions and links for each thumbnail.

There's another interesting tidbit that I can share relating to videos. YouTube has the ability to share the video player code that you can put on any web page. They call it the Embed Video code. When we usually refer to embedding something on your website, we are usually referring to how you can take a snippet of code like YouTube provides, and pasting it into a page. This is how we get some vendor catalogs to appear on pages as well.

Within the Google Partner training, and when you look at some of the training videos in the Google Search Console channel on YouTube, they refer to "embedding" as something totally different. In those videos, when they refer to embedding video on a website, they are actually talking about uploading the video files to your own website rather than to YouTube.

Most small businesses won't be able to upload videos to their website because video files are huge, and normal web hosting plans do not include storage space or monthly bandwidth capacity for videos. That's why we have services like YouTube and Vimeo. If you are hosting videos on your own website then you will need to set up all the appropriate schema.org markup tags in order for Google to include those videos in Google Search results. This is highly technical and really requires a a high capacity hosting plan and a developer to set this up. The training within the Google Partner program actually says that Google Partners should urge their customers to NOT embed videos within their domain because it creates page loading latency. (slows the pages down) Instead, we should urge our customers to use dedicated video hosting services.

Come to think of it, when we had IJO as a client in the mid 2000s, they had a few video commercials about their IJO Master Jeweler program that we were hosting for them. This was right before YouTube existed, and into the early years of YouTube. Back then you had to host your own videos and bandwidth was very expensive. There was this one video that one of their jewelers had copied the code for their own website. That is, they copies the code, not the video. The video was placed on that jeweler's home page, and it would automatically play every time someone went to that jeweler's home page. At the end of that first month of hosting those IJO videos, IJO's bandwidth had skyrocketed. Since bandwidth was at a higher premium back then, we had to charge IJO extra. We then blocked other websites from playing the video so the only people who could watch it were actual IJO members. In other words, the IJO members could use the video, but they all had to upload it to their own hosting plans and pay for their own bandwidth usage.

Even though you didn't ask about it, we should add the extra details about videos on product detail pages. If you're using simple videos to show the 360 video of a product, you probably do not want to spend any time to optimize those videos to their own page. But if you make videos that are more like infomercials or like what you would see on the Jewelry Home Shopping Network, then those videos should defiantly be linked to their own page with a transcript of the video.
AT: 11/12/2021 08:17:59 PM  
0 Comments:

Post a Comment
 
Comments are closed.