Online marketers use a wide range of tactics to increase their videos’ SEO and to empower their videos’ success. Despite the increasing number of video streaming platforms that exist today, YouTube remains the second most popular search engine in the world. Increasing YouTube SEO can ensure a rewarding video marketing strategy. One way to do that is by adding multilingual subtitles and captions to your videos.
The Benefits of Adding Subtitles and Captions Include:
- Ranking higher against competitors – Provided that your competitors use only one language in their videos, it lowers their ability to rank higher on search engines.
- Reaching global audience – The more languages, the merrier. It is quite easy to reach the global audience with multilingual subtitles because 70% of YouTube users come from non-English speaking countries.
- Higher conversion rates – When your video ranks higher against competitors and has the potential to reach the global audience, higher conversion rates occur.
How Using Subtitles and Captions Can Improve SEO
Your business can achieve YouTube SEO improvement with optimized playlists, descriptions, meta data, and the videos themselves. The video SEO increases with captions because Google indexes closed captions. Using more keyword dense content makes it possible for it to appear on search engine results pages (SERP’s) multiple times.
Let’s start with explaining some terms first.
Subtitles help understand parts of the audio that is not clear to the listener. For instance, when the video is in a different language or when the accent is hard to comprehend.
Captions on the other hand, are primarily in the same language as the audio but help hard of hearing or deaf people to get a better grasp of what is happening. An example would be when there’s background music relevant to the content.
Lastly, closed captions are not immediately displayed when the video starts, but when a viewer decides they want them, they can turn them on. It’s just like when you have the option to turn on the subtitles during the news.
How to Leverage the Power of Subtitles and Captions on Videos
Adding closed captions
Consider adding closed captions when your video contains speech. They will not only help hearing impaired people, but also those who are watching the video in loud surroundings or without speakers.
Do this by uploading a caption file or a transcript. YouTube will then sync the transcript with video and put time stamps on it with its automatic speech recognition program. Here’s the tutorial:
Additionally, have your captions translated into other languages. This way your videos can reach a global audience. The results will be staggering–your business will broaden its foreign reach and gain more viewers and higher rankings.
Writing Good Title, Tags, and Description
Your videos should have keyword-optimized titles, tags and descriptions so that the users will easily find your videos. Just be sure to not overuse keywords, that practice can end with penalization from YouTube.
YouTube’s video analytics tool and Keyword planner can help you in keyword optimization. Here’s how:
Pasting the Transcript into the Description Field
Consider pasting the transcript into the description field. It can give the viewers a hint of what the video is going to be about before they actually watch it. It also serves as a help in deciphering some parts of the content that were hard to understand.
This practice works better with shorter videos with around 2-3 minutes of text. If your text is longer, add only relevant information and a link to the entire text.
Now that we’ve summed up the benefits to adding multilingual subtitles and captions to your videos, you can get help in adding these strategies today by clicking below.
