How to tell whether your video SEO is working

Video SEO is slow, which makes it unusually easy to fool yourself about. Here is what to look at, in what order, and how long to leave it before drawing a conclusion.

1. The video indexing report in Search Console

The first thing to check and the most concrete. It tells you which pages with video were indexed as video, and for the ones that were not, why.

The usual reasons are prosaic and fixable: the video was not found, the thumbnail could not be fetched, or the video is not the main content of the page. That report is a to-do list.

2. Impressions for pages with video

In the performance report, compare impressions for pages that have video against comparable pages that do not. Impressions move before clicks do, so this is the earliest real signal available.

Compare like with like. Product pages against product pages, over the same period, ideally excluding anything that was also redesigned.

3. Click-through rate on those pages

If a page is appearing as a video result and the thumbnail is good, CTR should improve — the result is physically larger and more noticeable.

High impressions with flat CTR is the classic thumbnail problem, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

4. What the traffic does once it arrives

Search traffic that lands and bounces is not a win, and video results can attract people looking for something informational when you are selling something. Watch whether the sessions coming in from video results behave like the rest of your search traffic.

The two numbers that mislead

Video plays

Plays measure autoplay, not interest. A page with autoplaying video has a play for every visitor, and the number moves when your traffic moves. It tells you nothing about whether the video helped.

Your own searches

Personalised, geolocated, and influenced by everything you have clicked. Searching for your own term and seeing your video proves nothing, and not seeing it proves nothing either. Use the report.

How long to wait

Six to eight weeks before the first serious read, twelve before a conclusion. The markup has to be crawled, the video fetched and processed, and rankings settled. Checking weekly will show you noise and tempt you into changing things, which resets the clock.

The comparison worth setting up

Before adding video to a set of pages, note their impressions, clicks and conversion rate. Add video to half. Wait. Compare the two halves rather than comparing the pages to their own past — that way a seasonal swing or an algorithm update hits both groups equally and you learn something real.