Do you want users to engage more deeply with your videos?
Key moments in Google Search can help you do just that.
I'm Danielle, a product manager for videos in Google Search.
And in this lightning talk,
I'll walk you through some ways to enable key moments for your videos.
We'll answer questions like, "What are Key Moments?",
how does Google identify key moments in a video,
and how can I get this feature on my videos.
By the end of this talk,
you should be all set to enable key moments
for your videos on Google.
♪ [intro music] ♪
Before we start talking about key moments,
I want to make sure you have the foundation
to understand how videos work in Google Search.
So if you haven't seen my previous talk on video best practices,
you might want to start there.
Check out the link in the description below.
With that taken care of,
we can dive into the topic of key moments.
So, what are video key moments?
Key moments are a way for users to jump directly
to the point within a video that's most relevant to their query.
In Google Search,
key moments can appear alongside a video result like this.
For each key moment in the video,
you'll see a time stamp indicating where that moment starts,
a label describing what happens at that moment.
and sometimes, a thumbnail from that moment in the video.
When you click a key moment and land on the video page,
that video will begin playing from the specific moment you selected.
You can find this feature on both mobile and desktop Search.
Key moments can appear for results
where a video is the main content on the page,
but they won't appear today for pages
that mix videos with other content.
Like a news article or E-commerce product detail page.
With key moments enabled,
users can see if there's a part of your video
that has what they're looking for,
so they might be more likely to engage with it.
Now that you've seen key moments in action,
let's talk about how to enable them for your videos.
With the right setup,
Google can automatically identify and display the key moments in your video.
Or, you can choose to manually label the key moments yourself.
If you don't want key moments at all,
you also have the option to opt out
using the nosnippet tag.
First, let's talk about how Google automatically identifies key moments,
and how you can enable this for your videos.
Google uses several different signals to look for key moments in videos.
With speech recognition,
Google analyzes the words that are spoken in a video
to infer key topics being discussed.
With optical character recognition,
Google looks for text that's displayed within the video.
Kind of like this,
which might indicate important sections of a video.
In limited cases,
Google may also use visual signals
to understand what's happening in a video.
Like the moment a goal is scored in a soccer game.
We expect to add more use cases for visual signals in the future.
These technologies let Google do the work for you
and save you time,
so you don't have to manually choose the key moments
in each of your videos.
All you have to do is some one-time setup work.
Make sure Google can fetch your video content files,
and add
From there, you can sit back and relax.
First, in order to analyze your videos,
Google needs to be able to fetch your video content files.
Use the
to identify the video file URL.
make sure Googlebot can access that file,
and that it's in a supported format listed in our developer docs.
One common pitfall is that sites sometimes use expiring URLs
that change frequently as a method of access control.
Unfortunately,
this also prevents Googlebot from fetching your video file,
so Google can't analyze the video to identify key moments.
If you're concerned about bad actors accessing your video files,
you can display a stable version of your content URL,
only to trusted crawlers like Googlebot.
Follow the guide in our developer docs
to verify if a requester is Google;
and if so, display the stable content URL on the page.
Google won't expose these content URLs publicly.
They're just used for internal processing.
The links that Google displays in search results
are the URLs for your web pages where the videos are embedded.
In order to support key moments,
these video page URLs must support a parameter that begins playback
from a specific number of seconds into the video.
For example, in this URL,
the
from the 30-second mark.
Now, you just need to add
to tell Google where to insert the number of seconds in your URL.
Within your
include a potential action property.
This property should be of
and have a target property
that contains the URL for your video page,
with a placeholder for where Google can insert the number of seconds
to skip to in the video.
That placeholder is the
that you see in this example.
This tells Google
that in order to link to a particular moment in your video,
for example 30 seconds in,
Google can replace that placeholder string with a number,
in this case, 30,
and display that link in search results.
When users click,
the video will start playing from the 30-second mark.
Check out the description below
for a link to our developer docs with more detail.
The
are only necessary for videos embedded on your own web domain.
For videos that you upload to a third-party platform like YouTube,
it's up to that platform to implement these best practices
across all their videos,
since individual creators can't control the site markup.
We just covered
how Google can automatically identify key moments for your videos.
But sometimes, Google might not find key moments
or you might prefer to replace Google selections
with moments you chose yourself.
So, let's talk now about how you can choose your own key moments manually.
For videos embedded on your own domain,
you can do this using
Within your
you can use the
to specify each moment as a clip.
Give each clip a name to label what happens at that moment
and include the start and end time for the clip.
Just like the
your page URLs need to support parameters that will start the video playing
from a particular timestamp within the video.
Use the
This should be the URL of the page
where your video object markup appears
with an added parameter to start the video
from the right moment.
For videos that you upload to a third-party platform
instead of your own domain,
it's up to that platform to give you a
to identify the moments in your video.
The platform can then add clip markup
to identify the moments you chose.
For example, on YouTube,
you can mark key moments in the description.
These moments will be eligible to appear on Google Search
and as YouTube chapters.
To recap,
there are two ways you can enable key moments
for videos on your domain.
If you want Google to automatically identify key moments in your videos,
Use
and make sure that Google can fetch your video content files.
If you want to choose key moments for each video yourself,
use
Google will prioritize,
showing the key moments that you define.
And remember, for both
your web page URLs need to support parameters
that start playing a video at a particular time stamp.
Don't forget to check out our developer docs
linked in the description below,
for full details on the topics we covered today.
I hope this video was helpful.
And feel free to leave any questions or feedback in the comments.
♪ [outro music] ♪