Google Launches Video Previews

As we’ve discussed many times, video as a SEO tool is incredibly valuable when competing for Google rankings, even for B2B companies. Over on the Google blog, Google has just announced the introduction of video previews in their search results. Now when video results are pulled into Google’s search engine results page, you’ll be able to click on the magnifying glass next to a video to see four short clips of the video (that all automatically play), to evaluate if you’ll want to click through to watch the entire thing.

By default there is no sound, but you can turn it on by clicking the little speaker icon in the upper left of the video previews.

Google search video preview example.

Note that video content providers have to opt in to video previews, so not every video will have a preview available yet. However, Youtube videos are of course already available for video previews, which means the majority of videos will have previews.

No doubt Google is implementing this feature to improve their user experience — to let them verify that the video is actually relevant. This is important because just like there are websites filled with spam, so too are there spam videos — videos that claim to be about one thing, but in actuality only have one frame (which becomes the thumbnail) that’s related to their title and the rest of the video is promoting something entirely unrelated, like adult websites.

But Google’s increasing stress on video results certainly reflects the increasing importance of video for SEO.