What Are the Secrets to Video Snippets Success

Today, video content forms an indispensable part of a powerful digital marketing strategy. It helps boost your brand’s credibility and increases user engagement.

Owing to the extensive benefits of using video as a marketing tool, businesses all around the world are leveraging it to increase brand visibility and growth.

And why not?

As per Social Media Week, 55% of people view online videos daily and 78% people watch online videos weekly.

In this day and age, not having a dedicated video marketing strategy means losing a good chunk of customers.

You, as a business, may also want to leverage the benefits of video content and share engaging and informative videos on the web.

But for this, you need to undertake measures that help rank your videos on Google.

Now, do you know how you can rank your videos on Google and make your brand visible online? Do you know what video rich snippets are and the importance they hold?

In this post, we’ll talk about how to strategically optimize your videos for Google search with video rich snippets. In short, we’ll know the secrets of video snippets success!

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

What Are Rich Snippets?

Before we dive into video rich snippets, it’s important to know what rich snippets are.

We all know what a SERP (search engine results page) result comprises of:

• A URL
• A meta description
• A title

This is called a “snippet.”

Rich snippets, also known as rich results, are the Google search results consisting of some additional details such as events, reviews, recipes, etc. It helps a searcher better understand a website and make a decision about whether or not they should visit it.

Here’s what rich snippets look like:

Image Source

As you can see, these search results are visually more appealing with add-on information shown alongside the URL, title, and description.

Note: Do not get rich snippets confused with featured snippets.

Featured snippets, or as they're also called, answer boxes, place content extracted from a web page in a box. This box takes the zero position on the SERP and answers your query in a way that's bound to grab your attention. The CTR (click-through rate) of featured snippets is significantly high as they are the first things you see on a SERP.

Now, on the other hand, when you talk of rich snippets, they rely on structured data pulled from the HTML of a web page.

What Is a Video Rich Snippet?

Now, it's time we come to the main subject of our post ā video rich snippet.

A video rich snippet is the information appearing on Google with a small video showing up along with the result.

Now, you may wonder what's the purpose of this snippet?

A video rich snippet helps a user learn about a certain search query in a more comprehensive manner with a related video. It works as a brilliant way for businesses looking to boost the CTR (click-through rate) of their search results.

Here's an example of a video rich snippet:

As you can see, video snippets consist of a title, description, and URL like any other snippet. But they also include extra information such as the upload date and duration of the video. They even have a thumbnail.

Now that you know what video rich snippets mean, you must also know one other thing.

Search engines can’t watch your videos, even though they know that your content is out there.

They need to put in a lot of effort to learn what your content is about. Hence, to assist them in this process, you need to incorporate structured data into your content. More on this in the next sections.

What Do You Mean by Structured Data?

According to Google, “structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.”

Let’s understand structured data with the help of an example.

Suppose you write an article on “how to make a pancake.” A post without structured data won’t share information such as the ingredients used, the time taken to prepare it, and the number of calories.

However, with structured data, you can assist search engines in crawling with relevant information, such as:

“It takes a total of 30 minutes to cook this recipe.”

“It contains 186 calories.”

“This is how it looks.”

And so on.

To help you understand this better, here’s an example of a video rich snippet that appears on entering the search query “how to cook a chicken stew.”

Image Source

To add structured data, the majority of websites use Google-recommended schema.org.

The reason for this is that most leading search engines easily understand this markup. You can also call schema markup the language of search engines.

How Can I Add Video Rich Snippets?

Although there are other options to add video rich snippets, we'll discuss the simple option of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper to implement schema.

Adding schema markup to your website is easy, all thanks to the help you get from this helper. Here's what you need to do.

Step 1: Visit the Structured Data Markup Helper Page

Go to the Structured Data Markup Helper page and sign in.

Step 2: Choose the Website Tab

From the two tabs, Website and Email, click on the website option.

Step 3: Choose a Data Type

Google will prompt you to choose a data type to learn how to categorize your data. The options you get here include:

• Job Postings
• Datasets
• Book Reviews
• Events
• Articles
• Local Businesses
• Question & Answer Page
• Products
• Restaurants
• Software Applications
• Movies
• TV Episodes

Step 4: Enter Page HTML or URL

If your page isn't ready and published, you can paste its HTML in the bar present at the bottom. However, if your web page is published, you can paste your URL.

Step 5: Tag the Elements You Wish to Markup

Next, you need to highlight page elements and assign tags to them, which will help you optimize the video for SEO. Ensure you create a comprehensive markup.

Choose the ‘Add missing tags’ button in case you can’t find a tag on the list.

Step 6: Create the HTML

Next, click the ‘Create HTML’ tab that you will find on the top right.

You will see a drop-down menu. We recommend ‌you choose JSON-LD because Google prefers this structured data type. It’s easy to use too.

Copy the code and insert it into your web page. Submit the web page to search engines after you create the HTML.

Test Your Video Rich Snippets

Before you publish your page, it’s crucial that you thoroughly review the inserted schema markup. This step ensures that you fully utilize the potential of video SEO.

Use Google Rich Results Test to quickly gauge the performance of your schema markup.

Note: Even if you have correctly implemented your rich snippets, there’s no guarantee they will be shown in the SERPs immediately afterward. Google talks about the same in its guidelines.

Google can take weeks to crawl and index your page in the proper manner.

So, all you need to do is implement the markup and leave the rest to the search engines. If all goes well you may see results in a few months, if not weeks. And certain changes may be required too.

Tip: You should learn how to fix schema validation errors.

Final Words

As the wheel of content creation and consumption keeps on moving, businesses find it harder to grab the attention of their audience. This makes it even more important to adopt the practice of adding video-rich snippets for video content. If you put in your best work with the tips and tricks we have discussed so far, you will most likely get to boost click-through rates for your pages and drive more traffic to your site.

Now, what are you waiting for? Take steps to stand out on SERPs with a beautiful and intriguing video attached.