How to enable key moment snippets in Google search

Learn how to enable key moment clips in Google Search so that searchers can jump to specific parts of the video they are interested in.

Google’s latest issue of the Lightning Talks series on YouTube delves into the themes of key moments.

It breaks down the various ways you can enable this search feature for video content by manually identifying important clips or letting Google automatically find key moments.

First, let’s review what the key moments are, and then we will look at how to enable them.

What are the key moments in the video?

The critical moment is a way for users to jump directly to the most relevant point in the video for their query.

In Google search, key moments can appear next to the video results, as shown in the featured image of this article.

For each key moment in the video, you will see:

• The timestamp indicating the beginning of the moment.
• A label describing what happened at that moment.
• The thumbnail of the moment in the video.

When you click the key moment and enter the video page, the video will start playing at the specific moment you choose.

This feature appears in both mobile and desktop search results.

However, the critical moment if only Appears in the results where the video is Main The content on the page.

They will not appear on pages that mix video with other content, such as news articles or e-commerce product pages.

How to enable critical moments

With the correct settings, Google can automatically identify and display the key moments in your video. Or you can choose to mark them manually by yourself.

There are two ways to enable critical moments:

• SeekToAction tag: Allow Google to automatically identify key moments in your video.
• Clip marker: Allows you to manually identify key moments in the video.

Please note that Google will prioritize manual identification of critical moments.

If you don’t want a critical moment at all, you can use the nosnippet tag to opt out.

Let Google automatically identify critical moments

You can set up automatic key moments by ensuring that Google can access your video content files and adding Schema.org markup to your page.

To analyze your video, Google needs to be able to obtain content files.

Use the content url attribute in the VideoObject Schema.org tag to identify the video file url.

Make sure that Googlebot can access the file and the format of the file is supported.

In order to support critical moments, the video page URL must support the parameter to start playing from a specific number of seconds of the video.

The next step is to add the SeekToAction tag, but remember that if Google can’t get the file in the first place, the tag will not work.

Adding the SeekToAction tag tells Google where to insert the number of seconds in your URL.

Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, November 2021

For more information about the SeekToAction tag, see:

This tag is only required for videos hosted on your domain. For videos hosted on third-party websites such as YouTube, this is not required.

When this mark is in place, Google will use different signals to find key moments in the video, such as:

• Speech Recognition: Google analyzes the words spoken in the video to infer the key topics being discussed.
• Optical character recognition: Google will look for text in the video that may indicate an important part of the video.
• Visual signal: In limited circumstances, Google may also use visual signals to understand what is happening in the video.

Identify key moments manually

For videos hosted on your own domain, you can manually define key moments using clip markers.

Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, November 2021

Inside Video object You can use Schema.org markup There are parts The attribute specifies each moment as a clip.

Name each clip to mark what happened at the time and include the start and end time of the clip.

Just like the SeekToAction tag, your page URL needs to support the parameter to start playing the video from a specific timestamp in the video.

For more information on enabling key moments, please see the full video from Google below;

Featured image: Taken from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, November 2021.