Five ways transcripts or captions improve your SEO
1. Increases search traffic to your site
Like most eager marketers, you want to give your website and content the best chance of being seen. If video marketing is the present and future, you’ll want to make sure your video content is being picked up by search engines too. By having a text version of the spoken words in the video you are allowing search engines like Google to crawl your content to find the keywords. The more content you have available to be indexed the more chance you have of being found.
2. Videos with captions appear higher in search results
Having closed captions on your video is not only good practice for accessibility, it also helps search bots find and index your content. The caption file is uploaded to your video, and the video references the captions as it plays. Like transcripts, it is readable content for search engine bots.
3. Improves engagement
A video’s ‘watch time’ is a key metric on sites like YouTube. You want to ensure your viewer watches until the end to improve your video’s ranking on search engines (SERP). Captions allow viewers to engage with the video despite not having access to sound, offering an increased chance of them watching it for longer.
4. Transcripts create extra content
With the transcript of your video content already written, you can use this to create more content to reach audiences beyond video. You could write a blog, create a slide deck, an infographic, a guide or lift quotes to share from your video’s content.
5. Captions improve the user experience
Search engines are now valuing sites based on their user experience and by presenting content in a variety of ways you encourage more viewers to engage with your content.
I know that when I am researching content and find a video, I will skim-read the transcript to get an idea of the video’s content to help me decide if it’s useful. We’ve touched on it before, but closed captions or a transcript allow people who are hard of hearing or who’s first language isn’t that of the video to read, access and understand content and keeping them on your site for longer.
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