Video has emerged as the king of online content. Consider:

• Over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos are watched every day.
• Cisco estimates that by 2021, 80% of all web traffic will be driven by video streaming.
• The most-shared content on Facebook is video-driven, a trend that Mark Zuckerberg predicted.

In the very near future, simply having video content won’t be enough. It will need to stand a cut above the competition.

One of the easiest, most obvious, cost-effective ways of boosting the visibility and performance your video content is the one most neglected by content creators …

Add Closed-Captioning and Subtitles To Your Video Content!

The power of video captions cannot be overstated. Even if your end viewer never sees the captions, he or she is far more likely to see the video in the first place. Closed captions introduce your content to a global audience. They may even be instrumental to keep you from getting sued.

Chances are, it took time and effort you barely had to spare to even make the video. The content may have been spontaneous, non-existent in written form. This is where a professional transcription service comes into play.

We take off your plate the busy work of transcribing your video a into subtitle-friendly format that can be uploaded directly to your video on multiple platforms.

Contact us now to find out how affordable professional subtitle transcription can be.

Still not convinced that adding subtitles will make a difference in your viewership? Think again. Clients have retained our video transcription services for any one of the following five benefits that video captions confer.

Benefits of Adding Closed Captions on Videos

1. Video Captions boost SEO

The best video content in the world does you no good if no one ever finds it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the soft science of customizing web content in order to get it to appear higher in online searches.

Studies have shown that 91% of all internet searches on engines like Google never make it past the first page of search results. If you want your content to be found organically, SEO is critical to your promotion strategy.

YouTube videos are particularly good candidates for SEO because the largest search engine company in the world, Google, actually owns YouTube. They are much more likely to assign a high rank to their own properties, which earn them ad revenue … provided that the search engines find your site and categorize it properly. Even if you can’t get your website to rank on Page 1, your YouTube video might be a lot easier to rank.

This is where keyword-rich content comes in. Search engine crawlers look for keywords to determine what a web page is about. They look for quantity of content (i.e. more words) to judge the site’s quality and authority.

Where could you put a lot of content? You are limited to the number of characters, words, or tags you can enter in the title, description, and metadata. You are not, however, limited to how many words you put in the closed caption field. This content appears on the site as metadata. Your viewers might not even see it … but the search engine crawlers will.

This isn’t just theory. Studies have borne this out. A study conducted by This American Life demonstrated a boost in unique visitors by 6.68%, and an increase of inbound links (another crucial component of SEO) by 3.89% for web pages that added closed captions to their streaming content.

Think about it this way— search engine ranking bots are software. They cannot watch your video and make sense of your content (yet). What they can do is read content and scan it for keywords. Closed captions give the bots access to a large body of relevant content to prove authority, rich with keywords so they can categorize your site properly and return it in searches people do for the kind of content you offer.

2. Video Captions Expand your Potential Audience

An obvious increase in your potential viewership will come from the deaf or hard of hearing. Think about this:

48 million people in the United States and 360 million people worldwide suffer from hearing loss

71% of people with hearing disabilities will bounce back from (immediately leave) a page with video content that is not dead-accessible. Page bounce-back rate and time-on-page is another crucial component of SEO for both websites and YouTube videos.

That is a lot of audience to lose for a simple fix.

Call us today about our affordable transcription services to help you capture this lost market share.

This is only the beginning. Video captions extend your content to a global audience. Subtitles can be easily translated, exposing your English-language content to non-English speakers. Remember, 8 out of the top 10 countries streaming those 1 billion hours on YouTube are not English-speaking countries.

Even if some of your foreign audience does speak English, they might not understand your accent.  Closed captions open up a world of communication possibilities in the global information age. This can be especially impactful in countries where your niche has little competition. Even if they are not qualified buyers for your company, the views and time-on-page boost your SEO.

Remember that both foreign viewers and the hearing-impaired can filter YouTube videos to only access videos with captions. You want your content to be in those searches.

3. Video Captions May be Necessary to Comply with Regulations.

Is your content subject to accessibility regulations by the Americans with Disabilities Act? The past decade has been festooned with lawsuits against companies who do not provide qualified deaf employees with accessible video content, whether for training, marketing, or internal purposes. If you require your employees to access video content, you need closed captions ASAP.

Reach out to us to get the process started quickly and painlessly. From video transcription services to ready-to-upload caption files and instructions, we handle the process for you front-to-end.

4. Closed Captions Enhance the Viewer’s Experience

60% of all video views take place on mobile devices. Users view content on these devices all day, every day.

in line at the grocery store, in the library, stolen glances at their desk in the office. Many of these environments are noise-sensitive. If they must keep the device silent, video captions may be the only way they can engage with your content.

This is especially important for Facebook videos. 85% of all Facebook videos are viewed without sound. Facebook calculated that videos with subtitles get 12% more views on average.

Subtitles also contribute to video comprehension. In a study conducted by Oregon State University,

52% of native English speaking students and 66% of ESL students reported that closed captions help them understand and retain information from video content.

5. Video Captions can be Milked for Extra Content

Once your video is in written form, the sky is the limit. You can repurpose the text of your closed captions for other pieces of content, including:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• eBooks
• Graphics with quotations
• Promotional Email text
• Infographics with data from your video

Market researchers and content creators may also discover and easily repurpose your content, boosting your exposure by including it in:

• Clips
• Reels
• Outlines for a report
• Study guides for students

If you rely on video content to run or expand your business, adding video captions is the easiest, most affordable way to quickly boost your results. Our video transcription services make it easy to get those results.

Contact us now. Speak to one of our transcription professionals and let us give your content the visibility it deserves!