What are the SEO benefits of Subtitles?

As a business, what is your primary goal while promoting your product? In today’s world, when digital marketing is THE thing, simply promoting your business via blogs and social media posts is not enough. You need to know which form of content they enjoy and make a marketing strategy based on that.

54% of people want to watch more video content from marketers. Hence, it is no secret that video content consumption is rising. In fact, as of 2022, a person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos. Incorporating videos into your marketing strategy is therefore necessary.

Today, a person will choose to watch a one-minute video to understand your product rather than spend time reading through a 500 world blog post. Well, the reason is quite simple. Storytelling is an easy format to consume content. It requires minimal attention, and videos provide just that to the viewer.

However, creating videos is still the first step. You also want your viewers to find your content. How do you make that happen? A viewer will identify your content only when Google identifies it. For Google to rank your page higher, it needs text. Here’s when adding subtitles and closed captions come into play.

You can add subtitles to your in the following ways:

• Type manually and embed the.SRT file to the video
• Hire a transcriptionist
• Use Google’s Live captions generator

The issue with the above-mentioned options is–it is time-consuming and does not guarantee accuracy. Today, even this process has been automated. Happy Scribe’s subtitle generator can add subtitles to your video in a few minutes with 85 % accuracy. You simply need to upload your file, and with a single click, you will have subtitles generated.

Now that you know how to add subtitles to a video let’s take a deeper look at how it helps you improve video SEO.

How does adding subtitles improve video SEO?

The tactics to improve SEO for a video are different from that of a blog. A blog has a title, body, and conclusion with the most-searched keyphrases embedded in the sentences. At the same time, videos have little to no textual content. So the bots fail to identify whatever is being said in the video.

This is why you need to add subtitles to the video. Along with a video title, description and tags, adding subtitles is a proven way to improve SEO for the video. Google can then crawl through everything and find the viewers that resonate with the video. This way, instead of you having to find your viewers, the viewers find you.

Plus, adding subtitles not only increases the keyword density but keyword diversity as well. This will help you bring organic traffic to your page.

Increases search traffic

Video content generates around 81% of organic traffic. So the equation here is–the more the video content, the more the traffic. Plus, if you have an option to reach a wider audience, why settle for less?

1. Cover a wider audience

Over 50 million Europeans are deaf or hearing impaired. This number is quite big to ignore. While subtitles are intended for easy viewing for a normal audience, closed captions have a different purpose.

The hearing-impaired audience can also relate to your video with closed-captions entailed to your video. So, it is rather smart to have closed captions support your video as it is a win-win for you and your viewers. This will certainly bring you more traffic and improve your credibility as a business.

2. Motivate viewers to turn sound on

92% of consumers prefer watching videos with the sound off due to their environment. Some might prefer watching your video on their mobile phones in a public place with muted sound. Subtitles help them understand your video better. It can motivate them to turn on the sound for a better viewing experience.

3. Target people from different locations demographics

You don’t want communication barriers to come in the way of reaching more audiences, right? There will always be people who do not understand your native language. Here’s when adding subtitles in multiple languages will help. It will attract more viewers worldwide and gain you foreign viewership.

Brands and marketers have come to use multi-language subtitles now more than ever. It is beneficial when an event consists of people from different linguistic backgrounds.

For example–you want to organize a meet and greet event online. You decide to invite industry experts to interact with your employees. This means participants from various geographical locations get together on the same platform. Here’s when a need for multi-language subtitles arises.

See More: Why You Must Hire Search Engine Marketing Consultant?

Improves UX and user engagement

Among the tens of videos that you watch throughout the day, very few manage to stick with you for a longer period. The ones that are more visually appealing and easy to comprehend would leave a mark.

1. Capture user’s attention

Research reckons that our attention span has dropped down to 8.25 seconds. This is lesser than that of a goldfish. For a viewer to engage with your content, he should first want to spend time on your page. For that to happen, you need to hook his attention for a considerable amount of time. Moving text in the form of subtitles comes to aid as it will ask for attention from the viewer.

2. Increase watch time

Facebook says adding captions to the video can increase view time by 12%. The more time a viewer spends on your page, the user engagement metric continues to rise.

If a user visits your page for the first time, he would want to understand your business in the easiest way possible. You can use textual and video content to achieve this.

You already have a 500-word blog post written about your product. You can add a video for the same. It could be an explanatory video or a testimonial of your product from the customers. Doing so will increase the chances of spending more time on your page.

Improves Google search ranking

Google will rank a page higher with good engagement metrics than a lower one. With the increase in viewership and an improved engagement rate, this is certainly not a given.

To come up with creative ideas for generating video content for your business is important, but not enough. It will not help bring you traffic. Producing interesting content and following SEO practices will help if you want to be seen on the internet.

Also, You Can read How to Boost Google Ranking By Improving Site Speed

Open Captions are a no-no!

Subtitles and closed captions are beneficial in ranking up your page on Google. But, there is another term called “open captions. SRT file open captions are already within the video file. At the same time,” subtitles and closed captions are added via an external.

Open captions are usually generated with expensive software like Premiere Pro. However, they do not contribute to improving video SEO. Since it is not an external file, Google fails to identify the text. So if you are making a marketing strategy for your business, it is not wise to add open captions to your video.

Some websites’ hosting services do not offer the option of closed captions. This is when you can use open captions.

Wrapping up SEO benefits of subtitles

That’s everything on SEO benefits of subtitles. Hopefully, the article provided you with all you need to know about the subject. If you have just started as a business, you must consider adding video content to your marketing campaign. Or, if you are already in the market and haven’t yet incorporated video content, then this article is the sign.

Well, everything said and done, simply adding captions to your video will not make you a one-of-its-kind marketer. The quality of content matters too. With these two things in check, you will grow with your viewers.

The theory is all here, and now it is time to execute. Strategize, create and stand out in the marketing race.

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