Video SEO is the set of practices that help search engines discover a video, understand what it covers and show it in results. For videos hosted on your own site, that means indexable watch pages, accurate metadata, structured data and crawlable video files or embeds. For videos on YouTube, it means YouTube SEO. Most SaaS companies need some of both.
What Google needs for video on your site
Google's video documentation describes the main requirements. A video should be on a page where it is the main content, embedded with a standard HTML element Google can find, and supported by a thumbnail and metadata.
- A dedicated watch page for each important video
- VideoObject structured data with name, description, thumbnail and upload date
- A video sitemap or video entries in your sitemap
- Stable, crawlable URLs for the thumbnail and, where relevant, the video file
- Clip or SeekToAction markup if you want key moments shown
Self-hosted or YouTube
Video on YouTube can be discovered by YouTube's own large audience and often appears in Google results, but the result usually links to YouTube. Video on your own site keeps visitors on your domain but relies on your site's ability to rank. Many SaaS teams publish on YouTube and embed the same video on a watch page with a transcript and context.
Text still matters
Transcripts, summaries and chapter labels help both people and search engines understand a video. They also give AI systems text to work with, since what those systems take from video content directly is not well documented.
Example
Product tutorials with watch pages
Hypothetical company Sparrowdeck has dozens of tutorial videos embedded in long help articles, several per page. The team creates a watch page for each tutorial, adds VideoObject markup and a transcript, and links back to the help article. The help articles keep the embeds for readers.
Common mistakes
Several videos on one page
When a page has many videos, it is unclear which is the main one. Give important videos their own page.
Lazy-loaded players that hide the video
Players that only load after interaction can prevent Google from detecting the video. Check with the URL Inspection tool.
Questions
Adding a video does not by itself improve rankings. A useful video on a well-built watch page can be eligible for video results and help visitors.
