The 6 Ways to Boost Your SEO With Captioning

In our previous article we spoke about a number of specific motivations for captioning your audio-visual content. Not only will your content become more accessible for anyone with a hearing disability, but captioning videos has the potential to increase views and engagement, especially from viewers who prefer to watch their videos with the sound turned off. What’s more, with a transcript it becomes much easier for you to translate your content into other languages.

Another great incentive is the fact that captions can do a lot to boost your video SEO. In other words, captioning and transcribing your video content allows you to improve the ranking of your website in search results.

What is involved in this and what are the specific ways in which captioning can help boost your SEO? Check out our 6 tips.

1. Offer more content for indexing

Internet search engines use bots for crawling and indexing the content of web pages, where they evaluate a number of factors, all of which have a role to play in your website’s ranking compared to other search results. One of the key factors is the amount of content on your web. Therefore, if your web features video or audio content, it pays off to provide a transcript alongside it. By converting your recording to text, you are able to effectively double the amount of content on your web without the need to produce new material. Although it’s a good policy to maintain certain standards of quality, we must keep in mind that SEO is, to an extent, a numbers game. This means that offering a larger amount of content can do wonders for your SEO.

A great bonus is that the resulting transcript can be easily reworked into an article or blog post, which means that there will more activity on your website without the need for you to create vast quantities of new content.

2. Help search bots do their work

Videos with captions provide better users with accessible content, which has an indirectly effect on your SEO rankings, and publishing transcripts is the easiest way to improve your website\’s search position and traffic.

If you use videos, webinars or podcasts to present your services or products on your website, it is necessary to provide the same information in text form to ensure maximum reach. Search engine bots need readable content for indexing. The bots can\’t understand what\’s being said in a video, but if there\’s a transcript below the video then it can be easily read, indexed and taken into account in algorithms which are used to calculate SEO. If you are able to provide corresponding transcripts for videos, podcasts, etc., these valuable texts will help your website get a better ranking.

3. Searching in videos? There’s nothing easier

The transcripts created and edited in Beey can be downloaded in several formats. In addition to plain text and subtitles (srt or vtt), the application also offers the trsx format. Just like the caption formats, trsx files contain timestamps in addition to the text itself. With that, it’s just a matter of adding a suitable interface to your website for displaying the transcript, which will be searchable by clicking on a word, which will move the recording to the corresponding timestamp.

If a timestamped transcript is provided alongside a video, the video will suddenly become interactive, with many more potential uses for the viewer, an extension of the content’s reach, and a greater chance that viewers will stay engaged for longer. Clever hacks like this can greatly benefit your website’s traffic, and as such they represent a big step on the road to improving your SEO.

4. Get more shareable content

Although listening to audio or video recordings is often easier and more popular than reading, sharing this type of content (especially excerpts) is difficult without a corresponding transcript. When the text is presented in written form, users are more likely to share it and by doing so increase the traffic to your website, which might be the best thing anyone could do for your SEO. Don’t forget that the more websites link your content, the higher your visibility on Google and other search engines.

A great example of this is the radio show This American Life, where traffic to their website increased after they transcribed and published their show’s entire archive. Among other things, they found out that more than 6 % of new visitors who appeared on the transcripts pages were sent there directly from search results.

5. Make more connections

Linking pages in the scope of the same website also has a positive effect on your SEO, so if you have product pages, published articles or even blog posts dealing with related topics, it’s always a good idea to make those connections explicit by using hyperlinks. This is where the transcription of videos and other audio-visual content comes in handy, because the resulting texts can contain hyperlinks leading to the relevant pages on your website.

Backlinking i.e., the inclusion of hyperlinks from other websites, is another key component of good SEO. Again, this requires the content to appear in written form, so if your video is published without a transcript, there’s no text with which hyperlinks can be created.

6. Provide search bots with more keywords

Transcribed audio-visual content provides relevant keywords for search engines, increasing your chances of being ranked among the top search results. Most of these important words are named entities, which appear in video transcripts often enough and which are extremely useful for search engine bots. What\’s more, transcripts can also serve as a basis for topic detection, another important component of online searches.

No matter how you look at it, captioning and transcribing your content can only help you and your website’s SEO. Just wait and see! Publishing transcripts alongside audio-visual content is an effective way of getting more traffic to your site as well as expanding the reach of your content.

Creating a Beey account and transcribing your audio-visual content has never been easier. Or you can let us take care of it for you!