Video SEO: Titles, Descriptions and Data for YouTube and Your Site

YouTube Help notes that a title and description are the two most important things helping a viewer understand content quickly; seen within the first seconds, both play a large part in whether a viewer keeps watching. A title should state the video's subject plainly, and the first two or three lines of the description, visible before a viewer clicks play, need the same clarity.

Adding timestamps for sections further down the description helps viewers navigate and tells YouTube about the video's structure at the same time. On a spa chain's promotional video, adding timestamps such as 'massage types: 0:45' and 'booking: 2:10' was followed by an improvement in how long viewers stayed watching.

When a video sits embedded on a site's own page, Google treats it as part of that page rather than as a standalone item. Google Search Central notes that the page's text should stay consistent with the video's subject, and that a video supported by surrounding text on the same page matters.

A video placed alone on an otherwise empty page leaves both visitors and Google short of context. A few paragraphs above or below the video summarising its subject closes that gap.

VideoObject is a schema that marks up a video's title, description, thumbnail, upload date and duration in a machine-readable way. Google Search Central notes that this markup can influence whether a video shows extra information in results, a thumbnail, duration, upload date.

This markup can be written by hand or added automatically by most content management systems; what matters is that the marked-up information matches the actual video content exactly. An old markup left over from a different video creates confusion rather than any benefit.

Google Search Central states that a video's actual streaming file, an M3U8 file, for instance, should not be blocked with robots.txt or a noindex rule, since Google cannot crawl a video it cannot reach. This tends to be a development oversight, worth checking once a site goes live.

Loading a video through a URL fragment identifier causes a similar problem; Google Search generally does not support URL fragments, so embedding directly with a video element gives a more reliable result.

A sequence worth following whenever a corporate video goes onto both YouTube and a site.

• Write the YouTube title as a plain sentence stating the video's subject, and fill the first two lines of the description with the same clarity.
• Add section timestamps to the description if the video runs over 90 seconds.
• When embedding the video on the site, add at least two paragraphs of text on the same page summarising its subject.
• Check that the VideoObject markup's title, description and duration fields match the actual video.
• Check that the video's stream URL is not blocked by robots.txt.

A workwear manufacturer had embedded the same promotional video across ten different product pages with no change to the surrounding text; Google could not tell which page was the video's original source, and its visibility ended up split across all ten.

When the same video appears on more than one page, each page needs its own text describing that page's specific product or service; the video itself can stay the same, the context around it should not.