At Google I/O, John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, spoke about new video structured data that you can use to help your videos gain more visibility in Google Search. The new structured data is called Clip markup and Seek markup and they work to help Google create key moment video clips in Google Search.
The announcement. About 9 minutes into John Mueller’s I/O talk about What’s new in Search – he talked about these new markup options to enhance your videos in Google Search.
Here is a screen shot of key moments in Google Search:
Clip markup. To manually tell Google what timestamp and label to use for the key moments feature, nest the following properties in your VideoObject. While Clip properties aren’t required, you must add the following properties if you want Google to show the timestamps and labels that you specify for your video, instead of the video segments that Google may automatically show for your video.
Note, YouTube videos handle this automatically for you.
Seek markup. To tell Google how your URL structure works, so that Google can display key moments that are automatically identified for your video, nest the following properties in your VideoObject. While SeekToAction properties aren’t required, you must add the following properties if you want Google to understand how your URL structure works, so Google can link users to a point within the video.
If you prefer to identify key moments in a video yourself, instead of letting Google automatically identify key moments, use Clip markup instead of SeekToAction.
Seek markup is not live yet, it is coming soon.
The video announcement. Here is the video where John Mueller announced this news:
You can learn more about these markups in the Google developer docs.
Why we care. With more and more videos showing in Google Search, you will want to take efforts to make your videos stand out from the rest. Using Clip or Seek markup can help richen up your video results in Google Search to help improve click through rates from Google Search to your videos.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.