With the pop-up ads getting more popular compared to the billboards and social media marketing almost taking over the television ads, digital marketing is rapidly growing to replace traditional methods to run business.
The broadcasts, printing press, telephone, and direct mail are nearly replaced with banner ads, carousels, mailer creatives, and innovative social media content. It is important to highlight video content that can be considered the primary priority of marketers today.
Apart from other methods of promoting brands, videos have attracted more audience and offered higher conversion than others comparatively.
As 85% of businesses consider video content as a major marketing tool, marketers have informed that they generate leads, direct traffic, generate better ROIs, and improve sales using the video content.
It should not surprise one to know that video content is one of the most preferred, demanded, and consumed types of media online. Videos are self-explanatory, easy to understand, engaging, and powerful than images, infographics, etc. In order to let people, interact, enjoy, and consume the videos one must make it visible enough for users to find it.
Even when videos are good enough to go viral, crawlers are unable to detect or read them as it is not capable of reading most media online. In the digital marketing world, these web spiders play a key role in visibility & ranking in search engines. They make sure the right content reaches the appropriate audience but unfortunately, they aren’t designed to work on video content that creates a void in the online space.
Video schema markups and video structured data are the solutions to this inconvenience that brands are still unaware of.
We will discuss in detail how video schema markups can help brands be discoverable despite not being directly read by crawlers on the web.
What are video structured data?
Video structured data can be compared to a catalyst that creates a better connection between the media content and search engines. It is a code written for the search engines like bing and google to activate their respective crawlers accordingly to read through the structure of websites, pages, and content of brands.
The content or data available on any brand’s website is scrutinized in fragments and the codes are decoded for better analysis and interpretation. The video structured data is a markup language that simply enhances the abilities of crawlers to read website structure & information precisely.
Google search works on multiple levels to understand a website more accurately yet it requires these structured data codes to provide relevant clues. These video structured data help classify content on any page, for example, a website page related to traveling will have content like locations, mode of transport, best time, weather, culture, festivals, and local cuisine.
How is Video Schema Markup related to the structured data concept?
Now that we know how structured data codes function to assist search engines to get short snippets about a page’s content, it is important to have a collection of these codes as well. That is where the video schema markup comes into play.
There are several types of codes for different requirements that must be obtained in the form of a collection to be applied on pages.
Schema.org is an active community that internally links codes and associates together to achieve one goal i.e. “to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the internet”. The objective of the community explains the rest functional usage of video schema markup.
Popularly there are three formats of video schema markup that search engines use in listing websites and displaying resonating SERPs.
They are:
- Microdata
- RDFa
- JSON-LD
Out of these, the JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data abbreviated as JSON-LD is the most effective format for video structured data. Unlike the other two it does not require technical knowledge or one need not be a developer to apply this video schema markup to their pages. The code can be easily pasted over the necessary page and the markup generates important links or clues for the web spider.
Crawlers being brilliant at recognizing and picking up the regular text-based content but fail when it comes to anything other than that. Even if the search engines such as google claim to be working on developing smarter bots for the same, it still isn’t available. Therefore, video schema markup on a page would provide the missing information and rest contextual matter to the spider for better ranking as well as visibility.
Benefits of video schema markup
#1 Visibility
Your optimized page gets maximum exposure on the web after implementing the video schema markup. Say you upload a video on any video-sharing platform and try to embed the same on your web page, using the video schema markup on the page can still lead to maximum views, lead generation on the way and pave way for more engagement.
#2 Drive traffic
Video content is a top consumed content online with an exponentially growing demand graph there are many OTT services utilizing the codes to drive traffic. While creating Video On-demand platforms, users generally upload video content and optimize the same along with video schema markup codes. There is a high chance that they will embed the content on their website where the crawlers feed the right information to search engines that in turn drive users on embedded sites. Users can then be forwarded to the video platform thus, creating a boom in viewers there as well.
Point to be noted that search engines provide results as per the need of their users. They pick the most relevant, appropriate, and exact content to make sure the user gets what it is looking for easily.
Using the video schema markup on pages just amplifies the chances of providing more accurate content to the searchers. Therefore, it is important to pick the right markup on the right page. Targeting the required objective of markup and applying it correctly increases the chances of achieving the stated intention of the content.
#3 Reach the right audience
Using the video schema markup with proper optimization helps the content reach the target market that might have increasing intent of purchase. The standard markup provides the right data to Google for easier encryption and ranking thus, brands must ensure the right configuration, set up, and access for the crawler to pick the correct content on site. Keywords also play a major role in the process and must be identified properly for maximum benefit.
#4 SEO and ranking
As we discussed the visibility of content with the video structured data along with schema markups, it also assists in practicing better SEO. These help in making the content more clickable thereby creating an impact over the CTRs and conversion on the whole.
Digital marketers will definitely understand the value of Search Engine Optimization for better results and business online. Implementing the best relevant schema markup is a secret to more discoverability of the content that can also obtain a better ranking on search results.
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