Google may be set to reward those who carefully structure their videos, as it trials a new feature detailing which subjects a video includes, and where you need to skip to if you want to see them.
The feature was spotted yesterday by SEO Analyst Amit Singh, who tweeted an eight-second video of a video (for want of a better term) about Indian street food as it appeared in Google’s search results.
Is this a new update? @JohnMu @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/dS1lzZdVpR
— Amit Singh (@seosadhu) September 16, 2019
The clip shows that the video has details underneath it of what it features. Viewers can skip straight to sections on the likes of ‘Samosa’, ‘Yogurt’ and ‘Banana’.
Singh included Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller in his tweet. Neither Mueller nor anyone from Google appears to have confirmed it yet, but sources like Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable have reported on the “in this video” feature, with the former saying it is part of a Google trial.
How does this help video creators?
Potentially, this could help videos rank for a wider variety of search terms. For example, the video Singh spotted might now be more likely to appear in Google’s Snippets for a search like “street food banana” or “street food samosa”. In effect, it means that a video can be made indexable in the same way as a piece of text.
How is Google doing this?
That’s never an easy question to answer, but we can probably assume that a person from Google isn’t physically sitting through videos, then dividing them into neatly titled segments based on what they’ve just seen.
It’s much more likely that Google is using speech and/or character recognition to identify subjects discussed in videos. For that reason, it may become all the more important for video creators to structure their videos with care, break them down into sections, speak clearly and perhaps use subtitles to give Google every chance of understanding their content.
For professional help in creating videos that grab the attention of both humans and bots, why not speak to Engage Web?
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