Google significantly revised its documentation on ranking pages that contain video content. While the change log lists three areas that have changed, a review of the content provides a case study of four considerations for digital marketers and publishers when updating content to improve relevance to site visitors—and Google.
What changed
The documentation that was updated relates to the ranking of web pages that contain videos. The purpose of the documentation is to communicate best practices for optimizing videos for higher visibility in Google search results.
Google’s changelog indicated that there were three major changes to the Video SEO Best Practices page.
- Clarified video indexing criteria
- Updated technical requirements
- Added a new section on dedicated viewing pages for each video
This is what the changelog shows what was changed:
“Improving the video SEO documentation
What: Revised video SEO best practices. In particular, we clarified the video indexing criteria and technical requirements, added a new display page section, and expanded our examples.
Why: Based on feedback submissions, we’ve revisited our video SEO guide to clarify what qualifies for a video result and how site owners can make it easier for Google to find their videos.”
Four reasons to update content
There is a common misconception that encourages changing content annually because “Google loves new content”, which is a gross misunderstanding of the Freshness Algorithm. Content should not be changed without purpose – otherwise it’s just “rearranging the furniture” rather than truly “redesigning the room”.
Google’s Reasons to Refresh Content offers a mini-case study of three things publishers and businesses should consider when refreshing their content.
These are the three reasons to change the video SEO content:
- Remove outdated content
- Improved information density
- Add fresh information
- Update for brevity and clarity
1. Remove outdated content
The old version of the documentation was written when video as web content was a “growing format” and the changes reflect that times have changed, rendering the old content obsolete.
“Video is a growing format for creating and consuming content on the web, and Google indexes videos from millions of different websites to show users.”
In-content videos are not a growing format. The editors of the website were right to remove that passage because it no longer made any sense.
Takeaway: Always stay up to date with how your readers perceive the topic. Failure to do this will make the content appear less authoritative and credible.
2. Improved information density
Information density, in this context, describes the content’s ability to communicate ideas and topics with the least amount of words and with the highest amount of clarity.
An opening sentence should reflect what the entire topic of the web page is about, but the original opening sentence did a poor job of communicating that. It referred to “Video is a growing format”, a statement that absolutely did not reflect the topic of the webpage.
This is the new opening sentence:
“If you have videos on your site, following these video SEO best practices can help more people find your site through video results on Google.”
The new sentence accurately describes the topic of the entire web page is about in only 23 words. Here’s something really cool: The second sentence remains exactly the same between the old and revised versions.
Takeaway: The lesson here is to revise what needs to be revised and not make changes when the original works fine.
3. Add fresh information
An important change that all publishers should consider is updating content with new content that reflects how topics evolve over time. Products, laws, how consumers use services and products, everything undergoes some form of change over time.
Google added content about tools available in Google Search Console that allow publishers to monitor the performance of their video content pages.
4. Update for brevity and clarity
The third reason for changing some of the content was to make it more concise, easier to read with simplified language. One of the subtle changes they made was to change the term “landing page” to “play page”. This seemingly small change clarifies the meaning of the phrase by making it super clear that they are referring to a page where videos are viewed. Previously, the documentation had no references to the display page, and now it contains 21 references to that phrase, introducing consistency in the message on the web page.
Many reasons to update content
Every publisher should consider reviewing their content on a daily basis, whether it’s once a year for a smaller site or breaking it up and dealing with different sections on a monthly basis, a content review is a great way to keep content relevant to users and discover new topics for content. Sometimes it is better to break a topic from a web page and create a dedicated page for it.
Read the updated documentation:
Video SEO Best Practices
Compare it to the old documentation on Archive.org:
Video SEO Best Practices
Featured image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands