A recent Google case study (released on July 4) shows how using specific strategies almost doubles clicks from the SERPs.
Google’s new case study published on Google Search Central based on an over-the-top (OTT) Indonesian Publisher Video highlights how implementing best practices like optimizing URLs and structuring data for crawling purposes increases discoverability and drives more search traffic.
While Google’s case study (How Vidio brought more locally relevant video-on-demand (VOD) content to Indonesian users through Google Search) focused on video-structured data, the insights revealed you can apply them to various content types.
Two key areas of SEO interest are the importance of using structured data and stable URLs.
Stable URLs fixed indexing problems
An interesting point from Google’s case study is how CDNs (content delivery networks) often link video and image files with expiring URLs.
Google`s case study touches on this but fully explains why CDNs should use stable URLs in its SEO best practices documentation page.
Google’s advice regarding CDNs and expiring URLs says:
The key points are:
- Google encourages SEOs and publishers to avoid using CDNs, which use “quickly expiring URLs for videos and thumbnail files.” Instead, they recommend using a single URL for each of their videos, as this helps Google index your files and collect crucial user interest signals.
Following Google’s instructions, Vidio ensured each video file had a unique stable URL that Googlebot could access.
The importance of using structured data
Google Search Central also highlights the importance of using structured data and recommends using its structured data testing tool to validate it.
Indonesian publisher Vidio did this by implementing Google Search Central video best practices, which include:
- “Adding the appropriate contentUrl property.”
- “Using structured data to provide the value contentURL in a supported file format.”
- “Validating that the markup has been implemented successfully using the Video enhancement section of the URL inspection tool.”
Google’s Search Central published Vidio’s results:
Google explained:
- “Within a year of implementing VideoObject markup, Vidio saw improvements in impressions and clicks on their video pages. While the number of videos that Vidio published from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023 increased by ~30%, adding VideoObject markup made their videos eligible for display in various places on Google.”
- “This led to an increase of ~3x video impressions and close to 2x video clicks on Google Search. Vidio also used the Search Console video indexing report and performance report, which helped them to identify and fix issues for their entire platform.”
The keys to better search performance
Google’s latest case study shows that the secret sauce for increasing search performance is ensuring that Google can crawl your URLs and use structured data to improve a web page’s chances of qualifying for increased search visibility through a Google feature like snippets.
