It's not breaking news, video is overtaking all other forms of content when it comes to attracting and engaging viewers. The question is not if you should use video but what you can do to make your video content more effective.
One very easy way you can boost your video’s power is to add captions!
If you not using captions on your video, it’s a shame, because captions really are a good way to make your videos go further.
Video captions are like subtitles and are the text that’s overlaid on video that syncs to the spoken part of that video & they help clarify what’s being said.
Captions are either open, meaning they’re always on screen and cannot be turned off, or closed, meaning they can be turned on or off by the user.
Why do we need them?
Subtitles make videos easier to understand, but the benefits of adding captions go beyond that! From boosting engagement metrics, to optimizing SEO and making videos easier to comprehend for those with disabilities, video captions have tremendous power in boosting your brand’s worth.
SEO
Captions can do a lot in building your search engine optimization efforts.
When you transcribe your video and include that transcription on your website or in your video description, search engines can crawl that and rank your video higher, since you’re providing text like any other.
But now, closed captions offer a readable text file search engine spiders can crawl, helping align your video with your keyword strategy. In general, closed-captioned videos rank higher in search results, but now that search engines can essentially read captions, their SEO power is exponentially higher.
Besides adding captions to your videos, boost your SEO power by embedding relevant videos on your main website pages, blog pages, landing pages, and more.
MUTE AUDIO
All the social media platforms default their audio on their timeline to mute. Captions help those who can’t hear what’s going on in a video to understand what’s happening. Without them, the viewers miss out on your content.
Beyond that, if your video is in English, you’re missing out on an entire audience of non-English speaking viewers. Adding captions in the language your target audience speaks helps immensely in making your video accessible to every part of the world.