Dental Marketing Update: Google Has A New Video Optimization Tool

Videos are quickly becoming the marketing tool of the moment. Many people would rather watch an informative video than reading content. So to reach as many prospective patients as possible, it’s essential to provide both of these options in your marketing strategies.

Once you have compelling videos on your website, you want to direct interested people to them, and Google is rolling out new tools for this.

To enhance user experience, Google needs to provide relevant search results. One way to do that is for Google to focus on key moments in video content. So there are now two tools that offer different ways to do this: clip markup and seek markup.

What Is Video Markup?

Markup refers to the way you properly index your video with Google so it can reference and display your information with relevant searches. 

Google requires that you have a title, description, and thumbnail image for your video so it can index your website with a proper markup and help more people find you. 

What Is Clip Markup?

Clip markup informs Google about key moments inside the video using labels and timestamps.

With clip markup, you or your SEO team can manually mark key points in your video using the VideoObject schema so prospective patients can find this information quickly while searching.

What Is Seek Markup?

With seek markup, Google automatically identifies the key moments in your video and highlights them for you.

You or your SEO team uses seek markup by telling Google about your URL structure so Google can then pinpoint the key points in your video for your prospective patients.

When Do These Tools Go Live for Use?

Clip markup is through beta mode, while Google is still testing the seek markup. However, Google hopes to see seek markup in use soon.

YouTube Is Also an Option for Optimizing Your Videos

Since Google is the parent company for YouTube, videos that you post on YouTube present you with an excellent opportunity for ranking with both Google and YouTube, which increases your views and ultimately traffic to your website. 

Creating Excellent Content for YouTube

Just like content for your website, YouTube and Google want videos with relevant and informative content, which will achieve higher rankings. 

So, here are some tips to keep in mind when you’re creating YouTube videos:

• Consider your keywords. Again, like your website content, your videos should include keywords to help viewers find you. Consider the key terms your patients might be looking for and then include those terms in your video content. You can also use a keyword research tool like SEMrush or Keyword Tool to help you hone in on relevant keywords.
• Include the pertinent information. Including all the significant video metadata that ensures that Google and YouTube can find your video. These are: titles, captions, tags, thumbnails, and descriptions.
• Add timestamps. You can manually add timestamps to your videos to bring “key moments” to your search results. For example, format your timestamp as 00:00:00 correlating to hour:minute:second. Be sure to list your time stamps in chronological order so it’s easy for Google to index them and don’t include more than ten. 

Do You Need Help Optimizing Videos for Your Website?

With videos moving to the forefront of online marketing, you don’t want your website to be left behind.

If you need assistance optimizing videos or fitting them into your marketing strategy, your marketing team can help.

At GDW, our SEO team creates customized marketing plans for dental practices to help them reach their goals.