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Technology Giant Google recently announced that they have launched new Search Console reports for video content. They will provide more data about video content to the site owners in the following ways: 

• A video enhancement report will help in identifying issues in your videos and troubleshooting the same.
• A video performance report will help in measuring the performance of your videos in Google Search and Google Discover. It will also help to identify ways to improve their markup
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How one comes across videos in Google?

There are three ways through which a searcher comes across videos in Google:

1. The main search results page
2. The ‘Videos’ tab in search results
3. Suggested content in the Google Discover feed

Let us have a detailed understanding of the working of the new reports that are being added:

Video Enhancement Report

For all the sites that make use of structured data to annotate videos, a new video enhancement report for “Videos” is now available in Search Console.

What does this report do?

• This report shows errors and warnings for markup implemented on the website.
• It shows pages that have error-free video markup.
• After an error is fixed, this report is used in validating if the issue has been resolved successfully.

Video Appearances in the Performance Report

Earlier, Google’s Search Console used to report on the performance of video content only in the designated ‘Videos’ tab. Content can appear with the video appearance if the page uses VideoObject structured data or if Google detects that there is a video on the page.

What does it do?

With its new Search Console, Google is extending its support for videos by showing the performance of videos also in the main search results tab and in the Discover feed.

How Google Crawls Video Content?

Google requires two basic things for videos to appear in the search results, namely, a thumbnail image and a direct link to the video file. In its search console, it has mentioned 3 ways through which they extract video content from websites:

1. Google can crawl a video if the same is in a supported video encoding. It can pull up the thumbnail and a preview. It is also capable of extracting some limited meaning from the audio and video file.
2. Google can extract data through the webpage’s text and meta tags the video is in.
3. Google can use the VideoObject structured data markup of a page or a video sitemap, if available

Conclusion:

Videos are becoming an important medium for posting online content. They keep your users engaged in your content for a longer time than a blog or an article. But merely posting a video is not sufficient. One needs to measure how their videos are performing on the search results to increase online visibility.

Presently, video snippets are dominated by the most popular Video-sharing platform Youtube and it gets difficult for other webmasters to catch up in the game. (lengthy sentence)This step by Google will hopefully help webmasters in improving their video content and earning a good standing on the search console.