The practice of optimizing video content so it ranks in search engines and drives organic traffic.
Video SEO is the process of making your video content discoverable in search engines — both in standard web search results and in dedicated video search tabs. It involves providing the right metadata, structured data, and page context so search engines understand what your video contains, who it is for, and when to show it. Think of it as giving search engines a detailed filing card for each video so they can shelve it in the right section of the library.
Search engines cannot watch a video the way a human can. They rely on signals to understand content: the page title and description, any text surrounding the embed, structured data markup (like VideoObject schema), transcripts, and chapter markers.
VideoObject schema tells search engines the video's title, description, duration, thumbnail URL, upload date, and other metadata in a format they can parse. This structured data enables rich results — video thumbnails in search listings, key moments from chapters, and featured video carousels.
Transcripts and captions serve double duty. They make the video's spoken content indexable as text, which dramatically expands the keywords the page can rank for. A 10-minute product demo might mention dozens of terms and phrases that searchers use, but without a transcript, search engines would never know.
Hosting platform choice also matters for SEO. Self-hosted video gives you full control over canonical URLs and link equity, whereas embedding from YouTube means Google may prefer the YouTube page over yours for the same video. Professional hosting platforms let you keep the SEO value on your own domain.
Video results are increasingly prominent in search. Google shows video carousels, key moments, and thumbnail-enriched results that draw attention and clicks. Pages with properly optimized video content can rank for queries they would not reach with text alone. For businesses investing in video, SEO is what turns that investment into a compounding traffic source rather than a one-time campaign asset.
host.video supports video SEO through auto-generated transcripts and subtitles that make content indexable, auto-generated chapters that enable key moments in search results, and custom domain hosting so all link equity stays on your site.