In the digital world, everybody has at least heard of search engine optimization and the wide-reaching effect it has on how target users and search engine crawlers interact with indexable websites. But in recent years, a new trend has emerged in the online marketing sector — video SEO. What is video search engine optimization? In a nutshell, it is the process of utilizing and optimizing video content embedded directly on your site or uploaded to platforms like YouTube, in order to improve SERP rankings in search engines like Google and drive more clicks to the services and products you market.
Video SEO shares similarities with traditional SEO, but involves more intricate technical aspects. In a traditional SEO strategy, the main focus is on optimizing your site’s landing pages, which necessitates finding keywords specific to the interests of your target audience and developing a content-creation strategy with specific intent. However, when optimizing video for search, the focus is on ranking factors that determine the success of the implemented strategies, which are not backlinks and page structure but rather CTR and total watch time.
Conventional and video SEO are interdependent, as in a traditional approach, the focus is to improve your site’s presence in web results, while in video SEO, the goal is to enhance your site’s position in Google’s video results or directly on YouTube. This is another way video SEO differs. Unlike conventional SEO approaches, when focusing on video content, the goal is not only to improve your site’s Google ranking but also to enhance its visibility on other platforms like Vimeo.
What Back-End Modifications Are Needed to Optimize Video for Search?
For one thing, the SEO specialist who handles your case will add the VideoObject schema markup in the HTML of your pages via JSON-LD, which ensures that Google understands the specifics of the content you want to use. On top of that, the SEO specialist creates a special XML video sitemap that contains the URLs, meta-descriptions, and thumbnails of the videos embedded or linked on your pages. This is then uploaded into Google Search Console (GSC).
Then, depending on how you want to present your content, the specialists might create closed captions (CCs) that are stored as HTML text elements and use lazy loading to ensure videos do not negatively affect the experience of your target customers. But modern video SEO approaches should not focus solely on Google’s Video rankings.
It’s a Complex Procedure
Improving your ranking signals directly on YouTube, the second-largest search engine in the world, can enhance engagement with your uploaded videos. The SEO experts you collaborate with perform keyword research for the title of the YouTube video to be uploaded and provide a description that includes time stamps.
The specialist you call uses YouTube’s localization panel and uploads accurate subtitles for the video uploaded. YouTube SEO optimization involves modifying video content to increase its recommendation to users on the YouTube platform. Meanwhile, SEO optimization for embedded videos deals with how your linked video content affects your position in Google’s video tab, or occasionally, in the search results themselves.
The optimization for YouTube is simpler, as it is largely limited to what’s offered in YouTube Studio. But if you want to optimize video for search results, the only limit is the time you want to invest in the process. The SEO expert you call could, for example, use the open graph protocol to control how the video media embedded on the site looks on external social media platforms and search results, upload your videos directly to a CDN, and ensure that your video previews are visible in the SERPs, which can help your content benefit from position-zero searches.
It’s Effective to Optimize Video for Search, But Be Wary of Mistakes
Video SEO is an efficient way to take control of the media elements present on your website and adjust them to improve your SERP position. But there are also many mistakes one could make that have a negative impact on your page’s indexability. For example, a common mistake is to embed videos hosted on a CDN or directly on YouTube without properly configuring the VideoObject schema markup in the HTML of the pages via JSON-LD. This causes your site’s video elements to be invisible in rich snippets.
Another common mistake is to skip the video XML sitemap or not upload it to GSC, which might cause the pages of your site with embedded videos to be skipped by search engine crawlers. Granted, this risk is considerably lower now than it was a couple of years ago, but it’s still something to keep in mind. Additionally, if you are self-hosting, you should upload videos in a modern codec, which has a positive impact on the page’s loading speed. AV1 is a good option, but H.265 works as well.
Finally, one of the worst mistakes you could make is to accidentally disable the /videos/ directory in your page’s robots.txt file, as this makes it impossible for Google’s crawlers to fetch your site’s interactive media elements. Additionally, you should test the functionality of your video playback on both desktop and mobile devices. Overall, the process of optimizing video for search engines is complex. But it is necessary, as video in 2025 has transformed into an essential part of the modern SEO process.
