Benefits of adding captions to your YouTube channel

YouTubers understand the need to create high-quality, engaging videos for their viewers. As a YouTuber, you spend hours coming up with ideas for new content, investing in the resources to create your content, and recording and re-recording to make sure everything is perfect…This is no easy task, and takes more time than people realize.

So what can you do to further optimize your content for search and ensure that it gets in front of your target audience?

One simple way to optimize your YouTube channel is to add proper captions to every video you publish. Read on…

How captions optimize your YouTube channel

YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world. People use YouTube to search for answers to their burning questions, to see “how-to” do something, to learn new skills or hobbies, or to simply just pass the time with entertaining content.

Google uses a special algorithm for YouTube to ensure that when individuals search for various topics, they receive the best results. How does YouTube’s algorithm work? It prioritizes relevance, engagement, and quality when creating the results for a search. Videos with the highest score in these three categories appear at the top of the search results list.

So what can YouTubers do to get the best rankings in these three categories? For starters, they need to create high-quality content with clear audio and good lighting. It’s also important to check the title, tags, and description of the video to make sure it contains relevant keywords for the subject. For a bigger impact on search and relavence, don’t use the free captions option within YouTube…it’s not searchable text. More on this later.

The absolute best way to improve relevance, engagement, and quality scores for videos on YouTube is to include professional captions! Captions and text transcripts allow Google to more easily crawl (read) everything that is said during your video to better analyze your content’s keywords and subject matter. Captions also expand your potential audience and help viewers engage with more of your content, improves your video’s scores, increases your number of views, and helps you to make more revenue per video.

Let’s talk more detail about how captions affect your YouTube videos:

1. Captions create a wider audience for your videos. Approximately 15% of American adults aged 18 and over report some trouble hearing, which is a large audience that can benefit from added captions to videos. More people visiting your channel and being able to watch your videos in their entirety thanks to subtitles means higher relevance, engagement, and quality scores.
2. Studies show that over 50% of people use captions on videos. These individuals are more likely to click away from a video or engage less with videos that do not include accurate captions. Remember that not everyone who uses captions are “hard of hearing”. Many individuals use captions to allow them to watch videos with the sound lowered or muted if they are in a public place. Others use captions simply because they enjoy the added clarification of what’s being said on screen.
3. Captions improve your keyword density, thus improving your search rankings. Caption files (.srt files) are added to videos in text format, so all of the text is used by the search engine to place your videos high on the list when someone searches not only your key words but relevant words in your .srt or caption file. The higher your keyword density, the higher your SEO optimization will be and the more people will be exposed to your content.
4. Translated subtitles help your videos to rank in different languages. It’s reported that over 60% of video views on YouTube come from non-English speakers. If your videos are in English with no foreign language subtitles, you’re missing out on more than half of everyone using YouTube! Adding foreign language subtitles to your videos means that you now have keywords in foreign languages, boosting your search results in those languages as well.

“So why can’t I just use YouTube automated captions?”

Simply put…because Google doesn’t crawl them! YouTube’s automated captions are not used by search engines to determine your video’s keywords and boost your SEO scores. These automated captions are not helping to improve your search rankings or put your video high on the list when your audience searches for the topic. They also aren’t helping to boost your engagement scores which in turn boost your rankings in search results.

Yes, YouTube automated captions are a free and easy option to add captions to your video, but they aren’t adding any benefit to your channel’s overall performance or growth. Want to grow your channel(s)? Take the step toward professional captions.

How YouTubers Can Add Professional Captions To Their Videos

Adding captions to your YouTube videos is easier and more affordable than you think. You can add captions to your videos by using BroadStream’s closed captioning services! Our team uses the most innovative ASR (automated speech recognition) technology alongside professional translators to create accurate and affordable caption files for video content creators.

For only $0.25/minute, You can add a same language caption file to your video. For $1.67/minute, you can add a translated subtitle file. Accurate captions at affordable prices – to help You improve your channel’s performance and accessibility with every video you caption.

To learn more about our captioning services, visit our page or contact us.