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Video SEO

Video SEO covers the steps that help videos get found, indexed and displayed in search engines: in regular Google Search, in Google Videos and on platforms such as YouTube. This entry focuses on videos on your own website. Optimizing for YouTube follows its own rules.

What does Google need for videos?

Google’s documentation says a video must be embedded in a page with <video>, <embed>, <iframe> or <object>. The page where the video plays must be indexed. Google recommends a dedicated watch page for each video. The thumbnail needs to be at least 60 x 30 pixels, reachable at a stable URL and not blocked by robots.txt. Googlebot must also be able to fetch the video file itself.

Structured data and sitemaps

The VideoObject type describes a video. Required properties are name, thumbnailUrl and uploadDate. Recommended ones include description, contentUrl (the video file), embedUrl (the player) and duration. Google asks for unique name and description text for each video. Google also names video sitemaps and the Open Graph protocol as ways to provide video metadata. Key Moments can be enabled with Clip or SeekToAction markup. The Search Console video indexing report shows which videos were found and why others are missing.

Example

HTML
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "VideoObject",
  "name": "Canonical tag explained in 3 minutes",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://www.example.com/thumbs/canonical.jpg",
  "uploadDate": "2026-03-12T08:00:00+01:00",
  "description": "How a canonical tag works.",
  "contentUrl": "https://www.example.com/videos/canonical.mp4",
  "duration": "PT3M12S"
}
</script>

Common mistakes

  • Linking to YouTube without embedding the video on a page of your own.
  • Thumbnail blocked by robots.txt, or a thumbnail URL that keeps changing.
  • Several videos with identical name and description.
  • A video on a page with no other content that is barely indexed itself.

FAQ

Do I need a video sitemap? It is one way to give Google video metadata. VideoObject markup on the page can carry much of the same information.

Does video SEO apply to YouTube? According to reports, YouTube ranks videos with its own signals. See YouTube SEO.

Sources

  1. Video SEO best practices – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
  2. Video (VideoObject) structured data – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
  3. What is video SEO? – Semrush (Zweitquelle)semrush.com

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