YouTube and Google are now indexing videos for text that is contained within each video’s closed captions and/or subtitles. Therefore, ensuring that your video is closed-captioned will certainly lead to increased views given that your video will now rank for any words that are contained within the closed-captioned text. This text will assist the search engine and will help with indexing and ranking certain key phrases.
Mark Robertson wrote an article on his website titled “In-Depth Look at YouTube Closed Captions, SEO, and YouTube Indexing,” where he explores the many added benefits of adding closed captions to YouTube videos. In addition to increasing accessibility and allowing your video to have a global reach with the addition of multi-language subtitles, Robertson points out yet another added benefit—advanced search filtering. Both Google and YouTube allow users to filter their video search to include only videos with associated closed captions. If your Web video is not closed captioned, you are not only limiting your video’s accessibility, but you are missing out on an easy marketing strategy.
For more information on captioning your Web or YouTube video, visit our page on YouTube-Ready Captions.
