Video SEO: how to get videos found in Google

Video SEO is the work of making your videos appear in Google Search, the Videos tab and Discover, as well as on YouTube itself. Videos hosted on YouTube are easy for Google to find. Videos on your own site need a little more help.

How Google finds videos

Google detects videos embedded with <video>, <iframe>, <embed> or <object> tags. It then needs:

• A thumbnail image it can fetch.
• A stable watch page: a URL where the video is the main content.
• Information about the video: title, description, upload date and duration, ideally from structured data.

The main content rule

Google only shows video features for pages where the video is the main content. A blog post with a video halfway down, or a product page with a demo video in a gallery, is unlikely to get a video result. A dedicated page for each video, with the video at the top and supporting text around it, is the best format.

VideoObject schema

VideoObject structured data gives Google the facts directly:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "VideoObject",
  "name": "How to Lace Trail Running Shoes",
  "description": "Three lacing methods that stop heel slip on steep descents.",
  "thumbnailUrl": ["https://example.com/thumbs/lacing-16x9.jpg"],
  "uploadDate": "2026-11-04T08:00:00-05:00",
  "duration": "PT4M12S",
  "contentUrl": "https://example.com/videos/lacing.mp4",
  "embedUrl": "https://example.com/embed/lacing"
}

Required: name, thumbnailUrl and uploadDate. Recommended: description, duration, contentUrl and embedUrl. Duration uses ISO 8601: PT4M12S is 4 minutes 12 seconds.

Key moments

Key moments let searchers jump to a specific part of the video from the results. You can enable them two ways:

• Clip markup: list each segment with a name, start time and end time.
• SeekToAction markup: tell Google how your player's URL handles timestamps, and it identifies the moments automatically.

On YouTube, timestamps in the description do the same job.

Video SEO checklist

1. One watch page per video, with the video prominent near the top.
2. A descriptive title written the way people search ("how to…", "…explained").
3. A custom thumbnail that's clear at small sizes, at least 60×30 pixels (larger is better).
4. A transcript or summary on the page, so Google and readers understand the content.
5. VideoObject schema with the required fields.
6. A video sitemap or video entries in your sitemap for sites with many videos.
7. Crawlable files: don't block the video, thumbnail or player in robots.txt.

YouTube or your own site?

YouTube gives you a huge audience and reliable indexing, but the traffic stays on YouTube. Hosting on your own site keeps visitors with you, but needs the structured data and watch pages above. Many businesses do both: publish on YouTube for reach and embed it on a dedicated page on their site with its own schema.

Build your video schema

Fill in the generator on this page with the video's details and copy the JSON-LD into the watch page. Then check it with the schema checker.