How to Add Videos Longer Than 30 Seconds to Your Google Business Profile

Google’s guidelines state that the limit for videos uploaded to a Google Business Profile is 30 seconds. However, many people have been able to upload much longer videos.

How did they do it? And how can you apply their strategy to your Google Business Profile?

I explain in this video.

Google’s guidelines say that your videos need to have a maximum duration of 30 seconds, but I’m sure you have noticed that a lot of people seem to have longer videos on their Google Business Profile.

How come?

My theory before was that maybe these videos were uploaded before Google implemented this 30-second limitation. But a recent Twitter conversation between Mike Blumenthal, Andy Simpson and myself revealed that it’s not that.

Andy claimed that videos can definitely be over two minutes long. He also found that, in the past, the problem has always been the file size, not the actual length of the video.

So, I decided to test this for myself.

Testing GBP video length

I took one of my longer videos (1minute 52 seconds), and I compressed it down to be only 38 megabytes. Then, I uploaded it to my GBP and it successfully uploaded.

I did encounter the current bug Google has with both images and photos, where Google won’t approve your upload at first, but if you wait 2-3 days, you see the photo/video got published.

Anyway, the Whitespark GBP now has a longer video, so the limiting factor appears to be the 78 megabytes, not the duration.

This is great to know because GBP videos are taking off as an important and valuable strategy for local SEO.

Why you should upload videos to your Google Business Profile

A few months ago, Allie Margeson discovered that videos are now auto playing in the Google Maps results; and Mike Blumenthal recently shared that Google’s local results are now showing multiple videos in a little preview panel at the top of the knowledge panel.

How to upload long videos to your GBP

To get a longer video on your Profile, you need to make sure it’s under 75 megabytes. And I have the perfect tool to help you with that.

Take your video and run it through VEED’s free video compressor tool.

Just click Compress Videos, upload your file, and then choose your quality. If it’s really big, you might want to go low. Check it out:

It took my long video and got it from 197MB down to 7MB!

Then I can just download this file and upload it to my Google Business Profile without any issues!

Now go upload some videos to your Google Business Profile!