Google announced yesterday that they have added two new reports in Search Console. These reports are designed to help business owners and marketing managers better understand the performance of videos.
There are three main ways that a person can find your videos in search engines:
- The main results search page
- The Google videos tab
- Suggested content in the Google Discover feed
What Are These Two Reports?
The first shows up in the Performance section. There is the tab for "Search Appearance."
This view allows you to see for which keyword phrases your videos are appearing, what your rankings are on search result pages, and what pages the search traffic is being directed toward.
The second report is located in the "Enhancements" tab. This one helps marketing managers get an idea of how they can better optimize their video content.
Where Video Schema Markup Comes In
"Structured Data Markup," or schema data, has been around for several years, but it hasn't gotten much general attention. Schema data is important because it helps Google and other search engine bots to better understand your content. Think of it as special code that that speaks in the language of search engine robots.
For videos this is incredibly powerful because bots can't see visual content. The only thing they can "see" initially is your video's title and maybe a short description. But when you add schema, you give bots more information, like a full video description, how long it is, what web page it's on, etc. It also provides a rich snippet that can be included in the regular search page. Since rich snippets are not as widely used for content, it's a simple "hack" that can quickly help your content shoot to the top of Google.
Why These New Reports Matter
Video marketing is becoming more and more crucial these days. With Google's latest update, they're providing users with a way to see how their video content is performing, and how their video markups can be better optimized. Perhaps there is an error in your schema code, or perhaps the keywords listed in your markup are not as effective as you had initially expected. All of these are things digital marketers can now view and test more easily in Search Console.
You can read Googles announcement here.
Additional Resources
If you're not sure if your videos have schema data you can check them on Google's Structured Data Tester.
If you need to create your video schema markup you can try tools like this one.
You can also learn more about these updates here:
