Videos are the most efficient and realistic way to tell your story and present your point of view. So, if you’ve already made the effort and incurred the expense of creating a video and uploading it, leaving it idle is waste of your time and money, not to mention a lost opportunity. Search engines do not have the ability to read or watch a video. Hence, if your videos do not have captions, then the search engines can only read the titles of the videos and not the content. All the speech in the video that could be an incredible source of keywords is, quite simply, wasted.
By creating captions for your videos, you will turn all the text into searchable keywords. Search engines rank captions by keywords. What was originally just a video sitting on the web, becomes a tool that creates extra traffic. Remember, search engines cannot read videos but they can read captions.
The result can be enhanced further by highlighting every important or interesting part of your video. All you need to do is take a screenshot of the specific part and publish it on your social media pages with a short introductory text and the URL of the video. Don’t forget that search engines do not rank the captions created automatically by YouTube due to the high error rate. You will need a proper closed captioning service and captioning company.
Creating captions is cost effective and you will get an excellent service.
Study
Discovery Digital Networks decided to test the theory of improved SEO and ROI with video captioning. They created closed captions for 8 of their channels. In the first 14 days after adding closed captions they registered a 13.48% increase in views. The next step was to switch captions on and off for some of the days. The traffic was clearly lower on the days that the captions were off. The lifetime increase in views stabilized at a substantial 7.32%.
The SEO studies conducted by Discovery Digital Networks, This American Life and SafeNet help quantify and record the benefits of captioning and transcription. The documented increase in views, search traffic, user engagement and search rank clearly prove that captioning has a drastic impact.
