Love Video Key Moments? Google Introduces a New Way to Enable Key Moments

Today, there's no need to manually label each key moment of your video.
SIA Team
July 20, 2021

Have you ever done a Google search (maybe for a video-oriented search query), and seen a video result where the video player was queued to start playing partially through the video–you know, not at the beginning, but at the portion of the video where, presumably, your search query was addressed?

That feature, at least among webmasters, is called video key moments. It’s basically the practice of queueing up a video to start playing from a given timestamp.

This feature was first launched in 2019, and is in use for both mobile and desktop devices.

So, how do you utilize the new way to label key moments?

Google says, “All you have to do is tell Google the URL pattern for skipping to a specific timestamp within your video. Google will then use AI to identify key moments in the video…”

What I think is insightful is where they say they’ll use AI to identify key moments.

Do you see a bit of a potential SEO advantage here?

We know that Google can listen to the audio of a video. We’re also sure it can read some images in a video (such as a PowerPoint).

So, use keywords in your video (both audibly and visually) to give your video a bit more on-page ranking power.

Google’s AI will then watch (or…read and listen) to your video, and have a better idea of what your video is about.

Of course, I’m not saying that all your videos should be PowerPoint presentations or have text-based images. I’m just saying that the more conscious you are of how Google can read videos, and if you optimally structure your videos (so that time stamps work well), you stand a better chance of having videos that rank.

Source: Google Search Central Blog