Captioning and SEO

Search engine optimization can be an elusive concept. This idea that depending on how you manage your website -- as well as your overall web presence -- your website will get more visitors. There's no simple formula to it. The gods of the web-searching universe do not reveal their trade secrets. I can think of a few questions for these deities:

How come their website is on the first page of Google and mine isn't?

Is hiring an SEO service company worth it?

What can I do to boost my web presence?

Well, NetCaptioning is a closed captioning and subtitling company. Therefore, I'm going to explain to you how adding closed captions to your online videos can boost your SEO.

First of all, how do we even know that the web gods are viewing the closed captions? Well, we did a test a while back to prove it. Take a look at this snippet from a tutorial video we created a while back:

We copied the text from a single caption from the video. We pasted it into the Google search bar and voila, our video was in the first position. However, there are a few things you must know. First of all, the text we selected was very unique and was unlikely to appear in any other video (we used "mushroom mycelium represents rebirth, rejuvenation, regeneration.") Secondly, it took time. If you upload and caption a video right now and then do this same test, you'll be disappointed. It took about a week or so for the video to be indexed and for us to see the results we were hoping for.

By adding captions to our video, we essentially add more pertinent data to help Google find the video. Therefore, adding captions is extremely effective if your video is very dialogue-heavy.

Did you notice the automated captions that usually appear in YouTube videos? The automated captions are nice to have when proper captioning is not an option, but due to their unreliability, Google does not index these captions.

Ready to start captioning? Check out this brief introduction to online captioning:

How much weight does Google put in online captions when evaluating your website and online videos? That's a secret we'll never know.