Last updated - February 16, 2022
SEO is crucial to bolster your online presence, whether for your website or videos. It helps you to become relevant for the queries related to your creations. However, you should have semantic optimizations and precise technical know-how to master it.
Adding subtitles or captions is the first step towards ensuring video engagement and views. The advent of auto-captioning tools is making it a lot easier. Simple teleprompter apps like BIGVU help you read the script as you record. It also enhances the lighting and audio of the video.
But is only adding subtitles good enough?
SEO Benefits of Subtitles
Your usage of subtitles will help determine the numerous benefits that your videos or site ranking can get on search results.
Making It Readable for Google
Google does not analyze the content itself and scrolls through the external information. It includes view duration, number, video length, engagement rate, etc. Since the evaluation of the creator’s content is not as per the subject or relevance, it leads to a loss of earnings.
You can help Google read your videos by adding SRT or VTT format subtitles. Adding these external subtitles and avoiding the burned-in ones will help Google pick the relevant keywords for your content. This step can result in an increase of 7% in your video traffic.
Improving User Engagement
Google accesses your video according to its performance and semantic relevance. The higher the engagement (in terms of likes and comments) and video views, the better ranking your video will fetch.
The visual impact of your videos becomes significantly higher due to subtitles. The resultant implication is that subtitled videos get better value from Google. It impacts the website’s user experience too. User interaction on the page (in terms of session time, bounce rate, count of pages visited) gets reviewed by Google. Visually interactive content with subtitles helps retain audience attention for long.
Boosting on Page Ranking
A trick that can become handy for you is to add a video transcript on your site. This way, you help Google read semantic elements as it can read your video’s speech through readable text.
It also helps those who have a comprehension problem get better access. Thus, increasing the ranking chance of your pages in search results. You can take a step further by converting these transcripts into multiple blog posts. Recycling can be beneficial.
Increasing External Link Opportunities
Attracting new opportunities is an unknown benefit you can get out of subtitles. Many sites often fall prey to the temptation of the more engaging subtitled videos and embed them in their articles. Thus, providing you with an opportunity to get free external links. It, in turn, boosts your domain authority.
You can get better results on this aspect if you have an in-depth video on a particular topic.
Enhancing Consistency
Subtitles can help strengthen video rank on generic and more competitive keywords. Say, for example, you can target a particular high-volume keyword with a video and help further increase semantic power. It can help you reach the first page of SERP (search engine result pages) or even the first search result.
Ways to Optimize Your Video for SEO
Knowing the benefits of subtitles is the first step towards optimizing your videos. The key next step is to understand how to do the same.
Add Them Properly
As explained in the first section, you can add the subtitles as a file. These can be in the HTML5 code. You can also upload your file onto the video platform for WordPress.
Complying with specific formatting and keeping the text in sync with audio is crucial. The automatic subtitling solutions can work the best and help save your precious time.
Using the Right Platform
Self-hosting the videos is not a great idea as it demands storage space and resources. Instead, you can opt for platforms like YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, or Wistia. You can achieve a lower cost of video availability with their hosting.
Optimized Title and Description Creation
Having video titles and descriptions with targeted keywords is always a better strategy. Google reads the code of your video, and hence it requires your due diligence.
Opting for Engaging Thumbnail
Thumbnails are crucial to increasing the number of views by grabbing visitor eyeballs. You can seek inspiration from established video creators.
Video Embedding
The final step on this list instructs you to embed your video on a relevant blog page. While undergoing this step, you should ensure a link between the text and your content. Google rewards the best treatment of the content of both video and text of the page.
Therefore, as you can see, pursuing the above steps can help improve the ranking of video or site significantly. While it is not an exhaustive list, it can help you move in the right direction.
