The goal of every YouTuber is the same: to get more views and to increase their watch time.
Nothing a vlogger enjoys more than seeing their YouTube subscribers increase, whether they are chasing advertising dollars or exposure for their brand.
YouTube is one of the most widely used online platform, with two billion active monthly users worldwide. This is an excellent marketing opportunity for your business.
However, not every YouTube user understands English. Captions are an overlooked feature that can help you reach a wider audience and grow your YouTube channel.
Want to know how it works? Keep reading!
What Is a Video Caption?
Subtitles and captions are written text overlaid on videos that represent spoken parts of the video.
The viewers can turn them on and off as required. A viewer can also choose to keep them always on andto change their aspect and size.
Like transcripts, video captions display words as they are spoken, allowing you to follow along.
In addition, they’re integrated into YouTube’s video player and don’t interrupt the video flow.
Video captions can be in the same language of the video or translated into different languages, allowing people with hearing issues or that don’t talk your channel’s main language to consume your content.
Benefits of Adding Captions in Your Videos
The advantages of adding captions to videos go so much further than simply making them easier to understand!
Captions benefit your brand in many ways, from boosting engagement metrics to optimizing your SEO and enhancing accessibility.
Real Accessibility
Are captions an essential part of video content? Well, they aren’t mandatory, but it’s a valuable addition to your viewers and to you because you will get more growth from it.
On the one hand, think about people with hearing issues.
These persons would be prohibited from accessing your content if you don’t provide captions, which is an unfair consequence beyond their control.
So, captions in videos help people who can’t hear the dialogue to understand what is happening in the video.
But you can also make your videos accessible globally if you add captions in the languages your target audience speaks.
You will be losing out on an entire market of non-English speaking viewers if your video is in English and doesn’t have any captions.
It’s easy to quickly add captions to your video in the languages you speak. To translate to other languages, you can hire people from freelancing sites to get the work done fast!
Engage Your Audience And Reach More People
In addition to boosting engagement metrics, captions help draw in more viewers. According to Facebook, captions can increase viewing time by 12%.
A study from Discovery Digital Networks found that captioned videos have a 7.32% increase in views.
Another study from PLYMedia discovered these astonishing statistics:
And this is easy to understand: even if you don’t have hearing issues and don’t speak another language, captions let you see a video anywhere.
For example, if you’re in a library, on a noisy train, or at the office.
If you’re at a place where you can’t watch a video with the sound on, or the area is so loud you can’t understand anything, captions help you watch a video without any problems.
YouTube has an auto-captioning tool, but keep in mind it doesn’t always work.
To make your video accessible, its captions have to be accurate, legible, and perfectly synced with the video.
Boost SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Last but not least, captions can play an important role in boosting your SEO efforts.
Since you provide text in captions, search engines can crawl your transcription and rank your video higher.
Now you can use closed captions to provide search engine spiders with readable text files, aligning your video with your keyword strategy.
Search engines essentially can read captions now, so closed-captioned videos rank higher, and their SEO power is exponentially greater.
Your website’s main page, blog pages, landing pages, and more can benefit from embedding relevant videos along with captions.
But captions don’t only improve your website SEO. Since YouTube is a search engine, captions also help your video rank higher on YouTube!
If you use translated captions on your videos, you can complement them by buying YouTube views from specific countries, that speak the language of your captions.
Here at EazySMM, we can help you acquire fast and genuine country-targeted views.
Just let us know how many views you desire and in which country, and we’ll do the heavy lifting for you!
Conclusion
When someone is watching a video on mute or in a loud area, captions are their savior.
On the other hand, if someone has hearing issues or plainly speaks another language, captions are the only way they could access your video.
Captions can do much more than simply improve engagement and watch time. They can be what determines the accessibility of your video to YouTube’s global audience.
Captioned videos have greater reach and that means an exponentially growing subscriber count.
Captions also improve SEO and are easily addable to your video. You can add them yourself or hire someone to transcribe, translate and manually add the captions on the video.
Begin to use captions on your YouTube channel today, and reap the many benefits that come from it!
Are you using captions on your YouTube channel? If not, why not? Share with us in the comments!
