“Above The Fold” is a way to describe the way you do not have to scroll to find an answer – or watch a video.
To fix a Google Search Console error message telling you that the “Video is outside of the viewport”, all it means is that when you land on a page, your eyes cannot see it – without scrolling on mobile, or using your mouse on desktop.
Video Outside of Viewport - Google Search Console Error
Some webmasters bury their YouTube video under blocks of text, and this is why Google Search Console throws out the error from the Video Sitemap “Video Outside of Viewport”.
It doesn’t actually mean you have a technical error that’s preventing Google from crawling your website, or that it’s bad for SEO necessarily, it’s just Google being helpful and offering you tips.
Everyone likes to find the answer they are looking for above the fold and under 15 seconds of scrolling – right?
Above The Fold - Serving Humans With Quick Fix Information
How to Fix Video Outside the Viewport – For WordPress SEO’s using Elementor or any other block builder :
- Use the block widget to place your video high up on the page.
- Use the Responsive Block Resize widget to make your video player responsive.
Developer and SEO’s: Add an attribute
Add the playsinline attribute to your video embed code to prevent autoplay. This will help prevent your video from starting to play before it is visible in the viewport.
Use lazy loading to defer the loading of your video until it is needed. This will improve page load times and prevent your video from slowing down the page.
Use JavaScript to detect when your video is in the viewport and start playing it only then. This is a more advanced solution that requires some coding expertise.
Many sole traders, or small businesses will be trying to learn DIY SEO, here’s a different helpful non technical additional explanation:
Work with your website developer to ensure that your videos are placed high up on the page and are responsive to different screen sizes.
Provide your website developer with clear and concise descriptions of your videos and their content. This will help them create effective titles and meta descriptions for your videos.
Monitor your website analytics to track the performance of your videos. This will help you identify which videos are performing well and which ones need improvement. You can do this with Google Search Console or if you have GA4 access, and you are a genius goblin, you might be able to tell me where to find bounce rate, as that’s still unknown to me.
Fancy a chat? Contact me online.
