Google update offers more insight into video performance

This week, Google rolled out an update to Search Console that allows access to two new reports focused on video in Search.

The update allows digital marketers to dig deeper into video performance in Search to pinpoint areas for improvements in video markup — the code that helps search engines read the content. This, in turn, can improve search rankings. 

Users typically see videos in Google search results either on the main results page, in the video tab, or in Discover.

What’s in the update?

One of the big updates is the extended support for performance tracking. If your website videos use VideoObject structured data for content, or if Google’s spiders have detected video on the page in other ways, you will now have better access to insights.

Structured data is information that search engines can easily read to understand what content is. Essentially, it makes it so robots can understand the video on your website.  

You’re already able to see a video’s actual performance under Search Appearance in Search Console, which you can see below, but the new tool update should make understanding areas for improvement and other fixes in your video easy to identify by giving you the ability to view click breakdowns based on result type. 

You’ll now see rich results (things like carousels, images, or other non-textual elements), videos, and web light results, which, as Google explains, is when they convert web pages to optimize them for slower networks.

The other update is to the Video Enhancement Report. This will give you insight into how your video’s structured data is being crawled and tell you if there is anything to be concerned about. 

Now, you’ll be able to see any errors or warnings for the structured data markup you’ve implemented — such as video duration, upload date, among other data that could be valuable for users. 

You can also use the report to verify if the fixes you’ve put in place actually fixed the issue by re-crawling the affected pages from within Search Console. You’ll find the re-crawl option in the URL Inspection Tool.

What does it mean?

We know video is important to every digital sales and marketing team (especially sales teams), and this update gives us the ability to make sure Google can crawl and index videos properly.

Before, you weren’t able to identify issues with what errors Google found in your markup, but the Enhancement Report not only gives you that ability — it makes it very quick and easy. 

It will be important to include the properly-structured data on your webpages so that you get maximum SEO-juice for your video efforts. 

If you’re looking to learn more about video best practices in Google, the company has been nice enough to explain everything in this helpful article.

If you’re looking for help creating the right videos for your company, we’ve got you covered there as well.