SEO rankings for video
As of 2019, video internet traffic accounted for over 80% of the global traffic online. This explosion of activity leads to the ever-increasingly true expression, "video is king." Not only are consumption rates both staggering and increasing, but video content viewers retain a higher portion of every message delivered, leading to a higher conversion rate on your product or service offering. The organic ranking has never been more critical in getting your video content seen online, but there has never been more competition for viewers' attention.
Ensuring your content has every technical signal for a search engine's bots can make a massive difference in visibility and, thus, viewership. Including transcripts and closed captioning in your videos is the best place to start when working to increase online visibility and SEO rankings.
The Rise of Online Video
Did you know that Facebook alone averages over 8 billion video views daily? That's over double the amount viewed in 2015. With this clear and extremely sharp rise in video consumption, it has never been harder to make your video stand out amongst the seemingly never-ending sea of video content. While the content you generate is still the main driver of how many views you will receive, one way to stand out within a segment or subject is by including transcripts and closed captioning for every piece of video content you produce. Not only are there many regulations that require accessibility standards to be met, but transcripts and captions can help Google and other search engines find your content.
This is where most people start when finding any video content. However, potential viewers are often unwilling to scroll deep into the many recommended results. Thus, your content must appear near the top of the results. Increasing your SEO value for each piece of content can help with that. Read on to learn how.
Transcripts and Closed Captions for SEO value
Transcripts for video may seem like a minor technical consideration, but it has many potentially game-changing effects on how video content is being found on the modern internet. Closed captioning and transcripts for video SEO enable the bots from Google to determine what the video is actually about. Google relies upon being a great deliverer of information and content. Thus, the more it 'knows' about your content, the more ready it is to serve this content to a potential viewer. By providing a text version of the audio in your video content, Google can be more confident that it is providing quality search results for any given term.
As Google's bots cannot decipher audio (as of yet!), closed captions and transcripts for videos are the perfect way to tell these crawlers what exactly they are looking at. These captions and video transcripts allow Google to crawl every word that is spoken in your video. Without these, the bots would often be limited to only addressing and cataloging the title and description. While the most weight is assigned to the title and primary description, the transcript adds many keywords that a search engine's bots will pick up.
Transcripts and Closed Captioning Improve User Experience
In addition to the primary benefits of closed captioning, there are also secondary user experience benefits. For example, a reporter could more easily report on events that include captioning by pulling quotes and names directly from the text. A student might be more inclined to utilize your video as a study guide if they can copy and paste the information they need into a personal resource. Factors such as these can lead to a general rise in viewership. As viewership rises, so does the visibility of your video's search results. With both of these working together, a snowball effect starts to occur. With more visibility, more viewership occurs. With more viewership, more visibility occurs. By utilizing closed captions and transcripts, your video has many technical aspects covered to increase both visibility and viewership, leading to increased rankings and overall conversions to whatever your video or business may focus on.
Content Creation
Another potential benefit of having transcripts of your videos comes down to marketing. Once you have created a video, you have a perfect basis for much more content. By breaking down a video transcription, you can create social media posts, white papers, online articles, and much more content, all centered around a common subject. By creating a holistic set of marketing materials, you can quickly become a valuable resource for potential customers, no matter what platform they seek information through.
How Link Electronics Can Help
Link Electronics is focused on helping our customers create consistent closed captions and transcripts as easily and quickly as possible. With products like our Ace Series, we can help you create videos that are easy to search for and more accessible to viewers. Contact Us today to learn more about how we can help support your business's goals and objectives.