It’s no secret that SERP features often take up a considerable amount of space on the search engine results pages.
While this can present a hurdle for SEOs, it also provides an opportunity to gain visibility and traffic if their content gets included.
One of the many different SERP features that have popped up over the years is the video carousel.
In this blog, we'll explore data on why the video carousel is important for SEO, who should leverage it, and how to optimize your videos to get featured.
Google owns YouTube. As such, videos from the site are frequently presented on search engine results pages (SERPs) as video carousels.
Introduced in 2018, the video carousel SERP feature displays a dynamic horizontal or vertical list of video thumbnails related to the user's search query.
Here’s an example:
Appearing on both mobile and desktop, the feature is designed to provide users with quick access to relevant video content.
Most commonly, the featured videos are from YouTube, but the carousel also includes relevant videos from other platforms.
Videos featured in the video carousel are prominently displayed, often above the fold. As such, getting included can significantly boost your content’s visibility and drive more traffic to your site.
But just how prevalent is the video carousel SERP feature?
Based on our proprietary data set of 500+ million search queries in Research Grid, we found that between July 2023 and June 2024, the video carousel appeared for nearly 40 million mobile queries and over 8 million desktop searches.
Keywords in Research Grid are rank tracked in both mobile and desktop every month.
As shown below, the frequency of the SERP feature's appearance has increased significantly over the past year, often showing up in the top 1-10 rank positions.
Due to the prevalence and prominence of the video carousel SERP feature in the search engine results pages, it’s clear why SEOs should consider optimizing their content to get featured.
The video carousel SERP feature can have a powerful impact on the visibility and traffic of businesses in a wide range of industries.
Based on our Research Grid dataset previously mentioned, here are the industries where video carousels appear most frequently:
The keyword categorization comes from Google – keywords could fall into multiple categories.
As you can see, the industries that see the largest impact include business and industrial (12.19%), arts and entertainment (12.15%), news, media, and publications (9.91%), and hobbies and leisure (9.78%).
As such, it would be advantageous for businesses in these industries to aim to get featured in the video carousel to take advantage of the significant SERP real estate it provides.
Recommended Reading: Tracking YouTube Videos' Rankings in Google’s Video Carousel
To maximize your chances of being featured in the video carousel, consider the following optimization strategies:
As previously stated, video carousels most commonly feature videos from YouTube (likely because Google owns the site). As such, hosting your videos on YouTube may increase their chance of getting featured.
Make sure your videos are well-produced, relevant, and engaging. High-quality content is more likely to catch the eye of Google's algorithms.
Optimize your video titles, descriptions, and tags with relevant keywords. This helps search engines understand what your videos are about.
Providing transcripts and closed captions can improve the accessibility and SEO of your videos, making them more likely to be featured.
Submit a video sitemap to Google Search Console. This helps Google find and index your video content more efficiently.
If you’re hosting video content on your own site, implement video schema markup on your web pages. This gives search engines detailed information about your video content, increasing the likelihood of it appearing in the video carousel.