Good SEO is about more than getting your site to the top of Google results.  It should also ensure that your content stands out from other top ranking sites. This is one of the reasons why having video on your site puts you at a big SEO advantage.  Google displays video results with a representative thumbnail image, drawing eyes significantly more than a simple text link would.  According to ReelSEO, videos have a 41% higher click through rate than their plain text counterparts.  Distinguishing your content from the rest results in more visits to your site. Not only are video results more compelling, they’re also easier to dominate.  ”There are far less video results in Google’s index when compared to other web assets,” ReelSEO’s founder and publisher Mark Robertson explains.  “As a result, there is far less competition for rankings and a promising opportunity now exists for websites publishers to rank well for terms they may have had more difficulty in ranking for with web results.”

 Video does still present some unique challenges to search engines, Robertson points out. “Because video can be published in many different ways (embeds, javascript, iframe, HTML5, etc.) and is itself a medium that’s difficult to ingest & analyze, search engines have a more difficult task in crawling, indexing, and ranking video assets on the web.”   So then how exactly does one ensure that their video content is indexed, and with the appropriate thumbnail and description?   By submitting a sitemap.

A video sitemap is a text file packed with useful data about the content of your video.  By submitting a sitemap to Google, you are informing the search engine of your video’s title, subject matter, run time, who the intended audience is, and many more details that will influence how and when it gets indexed.  You can imagine how valuable it is to have Google know this information.  The better Google understands the content of your video, the more they can do to ensure that it reaches the appropriate audience.  If indexed properly, whenever potential clients perform a search relevant to your content, Google will display the information and thumbnail image from your video sitemap on their results page.