Igor P.
How to Make Videos Appear as Rich Results in Google Search
In this article we’ll show you how to add video schema markup to your website using free or premium WordPress plugins. We’ll also share some valuable tips on how to publish and optimize videos on your site.
Billions of searches occur on Google every day. Users search for all kind of stuff, including multimedia content like images, audio, and videos. Search engines can display these search results in different ways.
Rich snippets (also known as rich results) are enhanced search results that display additional information about a web page. The most common rich results you’ll see for products, reviews, videos, articles, etc. Find out more about rich snippets and how to add them to your site.
In this guide, we’ll talk about video rich snippets, which may be useful for photography and videography websites.
Video schema markup helps Google better understand the details about your videos and serve them in search results (as rich results), so that more people discover and watch your videos. Here is an example:
Videos can appear in Google search results, video search results, image search results and Google Discover.
Implementing video schema markup can help you make your video content visible in search engines and, eventually, get more traffic to the web pages listing those videos.
How to add video schema markup to your WordPress site
The easiest way to implement video schema markup is by using designated free or premium WordPress plugins. Below is a list of free and premium plugins you can use to add video schema.
Free WordPress plugins
This plugin can help you set up different schema types on your site, including video schema.
Here is how to set it up:
- Install the plugin
- Click on Edit on any page/post where you have videos
- Scroll down until you reach the WP SEO Structured Data Schema section
- Select Video schema and fill in the required info
- Tick the “Enable” box and save your page/post
Keep in mind that this plugin will only annotate one video per page.
Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP
This is a relatively new plugin, but it works well and supports AMP (accelerated mobile pages), which helps you create mobile optimized pages.
Follow the steps bellow to set up video schema:
- Install the plugin
- Set up different schema types for different pages or posts by going to Structured Data – Schema Types – Add Schema Type
- Click on Edit for any page/post and scroll down until you reach the Schema & Structured data section
- The plugin will automatically fetch the data for you, but you can also manually edit all the fields
- You can also add custom code in the Custom Schema field, if you’re familiar with coding
- Save your page/post
Premium WordPress plugins
The free version allows you to annotate 1 video per post or page. However, the premium version allows you to add as many videos as you like.
Apart from that, you’ll be able to generate a video sitemap, which allows Google to discover and crawl videos on your site.
In this comprehensive guide you’ll find everything you need to know about Rank Math’s schema generator options and its configuration.
Bonus: Video Optimization Tips
Here are some useful tips and tricks on how to host, publish, and optimize videos on your website:
1. Embed videos rather than hosting them on your site
You can store and serve videos on your WordPress site in different ways. Your videos can be:
- Self hosted – you upload the video to your site and publish it on any desired page or post. In this case, the video will be loaded directly from your site.
- Embedded – you share a video pulled from a video sharing website, such as Youtube, Vimeo, etc.
If you want to publish multiple videos, it’s better to embed them, to reduce your page size and preserve a fast loading time.
2. Optimize videos
If you choose to host videos on your site, keep in mind that video files take up a lot of space on your server and can slow down your site. To avoid this, make sure you optimize them before uploading.
Here’s a great free tool for video optimization that you can use.
3. Lazy load videos
This solution allows you to load videos only when the users click on the play button, instead of loading them all when the users access a page. This one step can considerably improve your page loading time.
To enable lazy loading for videos, you can use the Lazy Load for Videos free plugin or enable the same functionality in the WP Rocket premium plugin.
Note: if you’re using Flexthemes, there is no need to use a dedicated plugin, as self hosted videos and embedded videos will be lazy loaded by default.
That’s it folks, hope you found this article useful. Keep in mind that schema markup is not a ranking factor, but it helps search engines better understand your pages and video content. Hence, schema markup is a nice thing to have, but it’s not mandatory.
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