Businesses are taking advantage of video SEO now more than ever. If you have yet to use video transcription and closed captions to improve SEO, you’re missing out on a major opportunity. Check out some of the ways video transcripts and closed captions improve search engine performance and results.
Rank Higher in the SERPs
Closed captions make your videos more searchable in the search results pages. When you create closed captions, a text file is created that your video references as it plays. This text file is readable and indexed by bots.
Increase Web Traffic
Just like captions, bots index the text found in video transcripts. When you create a transcription of your video, Google bots are able to crawl the text, to better understand its content, and potentially increase your placement in the search engines. Research has shown a noticeable increase in revenue earned by web pages that contain video transcripts compared to pages without transcripts.
Improve Engagement
Watch time is a major factor for ranking videos on YouTube. The longer the watch time, the higher in the SERPs your video will be. The use of closed captions helps improve engagement as viewers are able to watch your video regardless of their audio availability. Closed captions, along with subtitles, are especially useful for mobile users as a video presented on social media channels is muted until users decide to turn on the audio.
Craft an Effective SEO Strategy
Video transcripts can be useful when building each video’s individual page. Videos contain prominent keywords that tell people what your video is about. When transcribed, these keywords allow people and bots to quickly scan the text to get a sense of the topic. If you’re targeting the keywords “custom t-shirts” but the phrase “customized tees” is spoken frequently in the video, you can also adjust the on-page SEO video elements to match the proper phrasing.
Boost Off-Page SEO
Longer videos result in a longer transcript. Use this to your advantage by breaking up the transcript over several pages which create opportunities to add more keywords. Take the time to research and choose the right keywords for each transcript page. Create even more SEO and cross linking opportunities by adding paginated transcripts.
Repurpose Text Transcripts
Once you have a video transcript, use it to create additional content for your business. There are several ways to accomplish this. You can simply summarize the topic of the transcript and take key points from the video. You may also lift quotes from the transcript and turn them into graphics. If your video is instructional, you could create a PDF guide. There are also certain tools that allow you to create video montages.
Enhance User Experience
It’s important to remember that Google want to ultimately optimize the SERPs for people, not bots. While SEO is important, it’s important to also consider user experience when posting videos. Video transcripts help enhance user experience on your site by providing information in text form that is accessible to all, including people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Closed captions also provide the same benefits.
Introducing transcripts and closed captions to your videos can help widen your audience by allowing more people to find your videos online. Make use of these simple tools to gain an edge when marketing your videos across the web.