How subtitles and closed captions help increase views for your YouTube videos
While captions provide access to a larger audience (e.g. viewers who need the subtitles due to being hard of hearing or not knowing your language), they also impact on how easy it is to find your videos on Google.
SEO - Showing up on top of search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, etc).
The Google developers documentation says that search engine optimization, or SEO, "is the process of increasing the visibility of website pages on search engines in order to attract more relevant traffic".
This means that good SEO is important for your video to be found on Google.
Let's say a potential viewer is searching for content that you already made a video for. For example, let's say you have a video titled "How to cook Quesadilla".
If your potential viewer searches for "How to cook quesadilla" on Google, they will find this as the top results:
As you can see, the first result is a YouTube video. This is because Google knows that for this kind of search, people are usually looking for a video tutorial.
Now, if you have subtitles on your video, Google will be able to read the content of your video and understand what it is about. This means that if your video is about cooking quesadillas, Google will know it and will be more likely to show it to people searching for that topic.
This is especially important if your video is in a language that is not the same as the language of the search. For example, if your video is in Spanish but someone is searching in English, Google will still be able to understand what your video is about and show it to the right people.
Accessibility - Making your content available to everyone
Subtitles and closed captions are not just good for SEO, they also make your content accessible to a wider audience. This includes:
- People who are deaf or hard of hearing
- People who are not native speakers of the language in your video
- People who are in a noisy environment and can't hear the audio
- People who prefer to watch videos with the sound off
By providing subtitles, you're making your content available to all these groups of people, which can significantly increase your potential audience.
How to add subtitles to your YouTube videos
There are several ways to add subtitles to your YouTube videos:
- Use YouTube's automatic captioning feature (not always accurate)
- Create your own subtitles manually
- Use a third-party service like Captionfy to create and manage your subtitles
Whichever method you choose, adding subtitles to your videos is a great way to improve your SEO and make your content more accessible to a wider audience.
Conclusion
Subtitles and closed captions are not just an accessibility feature - they're a powerful tool for improving your video's SEO and reaching a wider audience. By making your content more accessible and easier to find, you can significantly increase your views and grow your channel.
So, next time you upload a video to YouTube, don't forget to add those subtitles!