Video SEO: what Google and YouTube ask for, and what video SEO services should do

Video SEO is the work of getting videos found in search: in Google's main results, its Video mode, Google Images and Discover, and in YouTube's own search. Video SEO services cover two different jobs, making the videos on your website indexable under Google's video best practices, and making your videos on YouTube easy to discover.

Google documents the first job in its video SEO best practices and video structured data guide, and YouTube's Help Center explains the second. Everything on this page comes from those sources.

Where videos appear in search

Google's video best practices

• Use an element Google can find. Google detects videos referenced by a <video>, <embed>, <iframe> or <object> element. If a script injects the player, see making JavaScript players crawlable.
• Don't make the video wait for the visitor. Google says not to rely on user actions such as swiping, clicking or typing to load it.
• Give each video a watch page, a page whose main purpose is to show one video, where that makes sense for your business. Features such as key moments and the LIVE badge depend on it. A page where the video is secondary can still appear as a text result.
• Give each watch page a title and description unique to that video.
• Provide a valid thumbnail at a stable URL. Google needs one to show a video in video features, in BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG or AVIF, at least 60x30 pixels, larger preferred, and reachable by Googlebot.
• Let Google fetch the video file. Previews and key moments need the actual bytes at a stable URL, so don't block the file with robots.txt or noindex, and watch for CDN links that expire quickly.
• When a video is removed or expires, add a noindex robots meta tag to the watch page that embedded it.

VideoObject structured data and key moments

Structured data hands Google the video's details directly. For VideoObject, Google requires name, thumbnailUrl and uploadDate, and recommends properties including description, duration, contentUrl, embedUrl, creator and expires. Give every video its own name, description and thumbnail.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "VideoObject",
  "name": "How to bleed a radiator",
  "description": "A heating engineer shows how to bleed a radiator, step by step, and which tools you need.",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://example.com/video/bleed-radiator.jpg",
  "uploadDate": "2026-10-01T08:00:00+05:30",
  "duration": "PT4M52S",
  "contentUrl": "https://example.com/video/bleed-radiator.mp4"
}

Key moments let searchers jump to part of a video. You can mark them up with Clip, giving each segment's start offset, label and URL (an end offset is recommended), or with SeekToAction, telling Google where timestamps go in your URL structure. If the video is hosted on YouTube, Google says you can specify timestamps and labels in the YouTube description instead. For livestreams, BroadcastEvent markup can enable a red LIVE badge in results. How markup turns into eligibility for these features is in how Google rich results work.

Schema.org's VideoObject also defines a transcript property. Google doesn't list it among its required or recommended properties, but a transcript on the page gives readers, and any crawler, the words of the video as text.

Video sitemaps and previews

A video sitemap is a sitemap with additional information about videos hosted on your pages. Each entry needs a thumbnail location, a title, a description of up to 2,048 characters, and either a content location or a player location; Google recommends the content location where possible, and a title that matches the one on the page. Google also accepts structured data and Open Graph for describing videos.

In results, Google may pick a few seconds of a video to show as a moving preview. To limit how long that preview can be, use the max-video-preview rule in the robots meta tag.

YouTube SEO: titles, descriptions, chapters and captions

YouTube says it doesn't accept payment for better placement within organic search results, so the work is in the video and its metadata:

• Title, thumbnail and description. YouTube calls these more important pieces of metadata for discovery than tags.
• Tags. Useful when your topic is commonly misspelled; otherwise, YouTube says, they play a minimal role. Adding excessive tags to a description breaks its spam policies.
• Chapters. List timestamps and titles in the description. The first must be 00:00, you need at least three in ascending order, and each chapter must be at least 10 seconds long. The same description timestamps are what Google can use for key moments.
• Captions. YouTube says subtitles and captions let you share videos with a larger audience, including deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and people who speak other languages. Automatic captions come only in the video's default language.

Your site, YouTube, or both

When you embed a video from a platform like YouTube, Google may index it both on your page and on the platform's own page. So decide what each video is for. A product demo meant to bring buyers to your site deserves a watch page of its own, with text, markup and the next step. A video meant for reach and subscribers is best optimized on YouTube, with a link to your site in the description. You can do both, letting the watch page add what YouTube can't: the transcript, the product details, the price and a way to buy. Short video on other platforms is covered in getting TikTok and Instagram videos found, and the evidence on video in AI answers in YouTube's role in AI answers.

Measuring video SEO

• Search Console's Performance report has a Video search type, covering traffic from results in the Google Videos tab.
• Search Console platform properties show how your YouTube channel's videos perform on Google Search, Discover and Google News, with top content and queries.
• GA4's Organic Video channel counts visits from unpaid links on video sites such as YouTube, TikTok or Vimeo.
• YouTube Studio covers views and search traffic inside YouTube.

What video SEO services should include

Whether you hire a video SEO agency, a video SEO company or a freelance video SEO expert, the work should map to the documentation above:

• An audit of watch pages: one main video per page, unique titles and descriptions, video in the HTML rather than loaded on click.
• VideoObject markup with Google's required properties, key moments where they help, and a test in Google's Rich Results Test.
• A video sitemap if you publish often or new videos aren't being found.
• Stable, crawlable URLs for thumbnails and video files.
• YouTube titles, descriptions, chapters and captions.
• Reporting from Search Console, GA4 and YouTube Studio, not views alone.

Be wary of anyone selling tag packages: YouTube says tags play a minimal role in discovery. The free SEO checker lists the JSON-LD types a page sends, so you can confirm VideoObject is in the server HTML rather than added later by a script. We don't make or upload videos; if you want the watch pages on your own site audited and fixed, from markup to crawlable embeds, our done-for-you service covers that technical side.