Adding subtitles, known as Closed Captions (CC) to your Youtube videos is important for a number of reasons. Firstly Youtube’s automatic caption generating software is quite appalling, and they admit that – they’re working on it! Not only that, manually adding Closed Captions does offer some SEO benefits too…
What are Closed Captions on Youtube?
Closed captions or video transcripts are simply subtitles for your Youtube videos. Introduced originally to aid those who are deaf or hard of hearing, and a topic recently brought to the attention of the media by a viral Vlog by Rikki Poynter.
“More than 800,000 people in the UK are severely or profoundly deaf. There are more than 45,000 deaf children in the UK, plus many more who experience temporary hearing loss. More than 70% of over 70 year-olds and 40% of over 50 year-olds have some form of hearing loss.” -Google Search.
Why you should add Close Captions (CC) to your videos?
Not only are you being courteous to those with hearing difficulties, but you are expanding your audience to others who may struggle with the English language, or even those who can’t listen to sound in their work environments. There’s some SEO benefits to…
Closed Captions & SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
As well as the before mentioned, close captions can tell Google (who owns Youtube) exactly what your video is about, helping it get indexed on Google search and Youtube itself. This alone is worth the 10-15 minutes it will take you to add CC’s to your video.
Another tip is to add the CC’s / video transcript to your webpage or blog text, beneath the embedded video. Some users also choose to add the transcript to the description box on the Youtube video.The Importance of adding Closed Captions to Youtube videos!