Get started with media SEO
Media SEO is the practice of providing the metadata (information) for your content to search engines to improve the richness of search results (i.e., “rich snippets”).
This drives more visits to your website. Wistia puts this video metadata on your page by injecting a JSON-LD file into your webpage’s header.
As part of your marketing efforts, following the proper metadata and general SEO best practices will help to improve your video and business presence on search engines.
On-page markup for Media SEO
To get those sweet SEO benefits, all you’ll need to do is use an inline embed code on your website.
The JSON-LD file is automatically injected into the head of your website once your page is live. We handle all of the tricky stuff— no sitemaps, no extra coding— just copy, paste, and you're done.
When search engines like Google crawl a page on your website, they can only identify and index media properly if the page includes the right video markup.
Google has extensive technical documentation about adding that markup (if you’re feeling like a light read), but you don’t need to worry about it! Wistia’s Standard embeds automatically put that markup on the page for you.
Note
Wistia won't inject SEO metadata for media that's password protected. If your media is behind a password, search engines can't see its details and it won't appear in video search results.
When you add a standard Wistia embed code on a page, we’ll inject the following markup in the <head> section for search engines to find:
Name: The title of your media, which you can set on the media’s page in your account.
Description: A brief description of the media’s content. It’s important to write a description for each media, which you can do from the media’s page in your account.
Transcript: Your media’s transcript file (either manually uploaded or generated through Wistia) is automatically formatted as metadata.
Thumbnail URL: The URL of the image search engines will use if they choose to display a preview of your media in the search results. Wistia’s got you covered on this front!
Embed URL: A URL pointing to a player for a specific media.
Duration: The length of your media.
Upload date: When the media was uploaded to Wistia.
These are all of the required and recommended properties listed on Google’s guide for video markup. As long as you add a title and description, Wistia’s got the rest covered. We generate free, automated transcripts for all Wistia accounts.
If you ever change that information in Wistia, it will automatically update on your website. There’s no need to re-embed your media.
Tip
You can use Google’s Rich Results Test to verify that Google is able to see your media and its metadata. If everything is working properly, you’ll see that Google finds a VideoObject on the page.
Manage your metadata in Wistia
The metadata for your video is pulled directly from your video's manage page in Wistia, so make sure you update the title and description for all of your media after uploading.
Media title
The title should be relevant to the media. Make sure it’s short and sweet. Don’t try too hard to make it wordy, or shove too many keywords into it. Just focus on appropriately naming the media for a viewer’s experience.
Media description
Be as descriptive as possible, but again don’t go overboard with keywords. Make the description useful for viewers, not for bots.
Transcripts and captions
Visit our help article to learn more about transcripts and captions for your content.
Optimizing SEO after indexing
The goal of SEO is to drive more traffic to your website. Optimizing your media content for search engines means that your pages will show up in media-specific search results, thus driving more traffic to your site.
When a searcher clicks the media still in results, they will be taken to your website, which is a major advantage over YouTube SEO.
We recommend keeping a close eye on your traffic during the SEO indexing process — see if you notice an uptick after your media content is indexed. From that baseline data, you can experiment with changes to improve incoming traffic.
First, make sure you have relevant content on your page so that search engines have context surrounding the media. If you notice an increase in traffic from specific searches, add more content for those visitors.
Second, the piece that drives audiences to click on the video is the thumbnail. Choose a thumbnail that looks attractive for the topic at hand.
Key moments and chapters
If your media has chapters, Wistia passes them to Google as key moments, so searchers can jump straight to a section from the results.
Give each chapter a descriptive title, as chapters left as the default "Chapter Title" are skipped. Without chapters, Wistia lets Google pick key moments automatically.
Key moments aren't added for audio files, media under 30 seconds, password-protected media, webinars, or media where a Wistia Form appears before or during the video and pauses playback.
To turn key moments off, add the keyMoments=false embed option.
Channel SEO
Wistia Channels create new pages for every media using query parameters to stipulate unique URLs for each one. Every page includes the same Schema.org structured data as a Wistia standalone media embed, injected via JSON-LD.
These pages are all readable by Google, and the relevant metadata is injected, ensuring the pages can appear in search with media snippets.
The markup is added when a viewer opens an individual episode at its own URL. Inside a Channel, the episode description replaces the media description.
Media SEO FAQ and troubleshooting
How can I see what my metadata will look like?
The Embed modal includes a dropdown menu that lets you look at all of that sweet SEO data.
From your video's manage page, select "Embed." From the Inline tab, scroll down to Advanced Options. Open up the "Preview" option under "Inject SEO metadata ” to see all of your metadata.
Can I see an example of the JSON-LD file on my page?
Check out a live example by inspecting the <head> element. Expand the <head> element to see the <script type="application/ld+json"> script.
Can I turn off SEO metadata?
Yes. In the Embed modal, open Advanced Options and uncheck Inject SEO metadata. This adds seo=false to your embed code. Embeds already on your site won't change, so copy the new code and replace the old embed on your page.
I thought only YouTube got indexed on Google search results? Should I have my media on both platforms?
Google has continued to support an open market, indexing media that follow their SEO guidelines, regardless of where they are hosted.
If the most important metric for your media is views, YouTube is a great place for them. If your goal is to encourage a conversion event, like a sign-up, subscription, or a share, then you want to drive viewers to your website to play your media. That is where video SEO can be a valuable tool.
It’s been several days; when can I expect to see my media ranked in SERPs?
It can take up to two weeks for Google to index new content.
Since Google can be a bit of a black box sometimes, it’s not possible to determine exactly when new content will be indexed for media results.
If you have been waiting for a considerable amount of time, double-check the list of possibly bad practices below to make sure your content doesn’t fall into one of the areas that Google doesn’t index reliably.
How do I find out why my video isn't being indexed?
Your best resource is Google Search Console. It reports whether each of your pages is indexed and, if not, exactly why — information only you can access for your own site. Start there for the specific error or warning, and you can also request indexing for a URL directly.
What can prevent media from being added to Google search results?
There are a few practices that we have seen prevent indexing.
Redirects are a tricky practice, and more often than not, they seem to cause failures. Google might not follow the redirect when crawling, or the redirects might be set up incorrectly.
Disallowing content in the robots.txt file would result in everything appearing “successful,” but your content never appears in search results. Double-check that any “disallow” blocks in your robots.txt file do not point to content you want indexed.
The video is not the main content of the page. Google only indexes videos it considers the primary content of a page. Keep your media near the top of the page (above the fold), at a good size (at least 600px wide), and avoid crowding it with other videos or unrelated content — otherwise Google may decide not to index it.
Does an LLM embed code include SEO metadata?
An LLM-friendly embed code includes SEO metadata by default and cannot currently be turned off. You can learn more about LLM-friendly embeds here.
The Schema.org validator says my VideoObject is outside the HTML
Wistia adds the markup to your page's <head> with JavaScript once the page loads. Some validators don't run JavaScript, so their results can look wrong. Google's Rich Results Test runs JavaScript, so trust that one.
My SEO tool says my page is missing a meta description
Your Wistia description goes into the video's markup, not into your page's meta description tag. Set the page's meta description in your website or CMS.
More questions? Give us a shout. We’ll be happy to talk more!