Recently rich snippets have become more and more prominent as the buzz surrounding them continues to grow, and for good reason. Rich snippets are a fantastic method to make your content stand out on SERP against the competition. At the end of the day, you work hard trying to rank on SERP, but it does not necessarily mean a whole lot of people aren’t clicking.
You need to stand out with content that leaps off the page, and there are many different types of rich snippets that can help you do that.
Adding content specific information to search listings can increase your click-through rate significantly without the need to even rank number one!
Several rich snippets are out there to be utilised, these small pieces of Meta data that often show up with your result and are easy to get started with:
• Authorship
• Star Ratings
• Event Snippets
• Reviews
• Business Snippets
• Songs/Albums
Now we come to video snippets. Getting started with rich snippets varies depending on the type so it’s worth checking out the different kinds to make sure your using them correctly.
Creating a video snippet for your site tends to be one of the more involved snippets, so much so that many webmasters and businesses continue to put off creating one, but doing this may be causing a loss in traffic.
This screenshot shows two types of snippet for the new film The Monuments Men. You can see the video snippet from YouTube but also the star ratings from Rotten Tomatoes.
YouTube Video vs. Your Website Videos for Video Rich Snippets
A video rich snippet means that when someone searches on Google, you will have a small tiny video show up next to your result to let the user know that particular result (hopefully yours) has a video to help. The searcher doesn’t specify if they want a video or not, however it helps you to stand out.
Most web users wish to have their video uploaded on both their YouTube channel and their website. YouTube continues to go from strength to strength for more searches not relating to music or entertainment, therefore you need to have an account with presence on a search engine, which ultimately comes down to Rich Snippets.
Make A Decision
When people visit YouTube, they will often navigate to a related video on the right of the screen, and most of the time these related videos are not yours. This means people might click on your video, but may not visit your website and may end up somewhere else entirely.
This would not be an issue if you also had a video rich snippet associated with the video on your website, however the YouTube result will almost certainly outrank your website and you would ultimately be competing with yourself and YouTube will always win.
Now, this might sound like an argument not to use rich snippets with YouTube content, but its important to understand some arguments around these methods. If ranking for YouTube will yield traffic or benefits then make use of it (many companies do) but if you want presence all over the internet use rich snippets away from your YouTube content.
