SEO means what exactly…?
This stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the way you get visitors (traffic) from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing (Google being the most popular one) to your website.
It’s not the easiest process to understand and many marketers find themselves confused by the process, so don’t worry if you struggle with it.
It’s not about the writing anymore
You probably have already noticed that in your internet search results, a lot more videos pop up than before. The internet isn’t just text any more and video makes up 40% of search results.
Did you know? Google views videos as more valuable than text because of the assumption that they are more time consuming to produce. So having more videos on your site will rank you higher on search engines and is a great way to boost SEO.
What makes transcripts and subtitles so special to marketing?
Transcripts are the written scripts for videos and subtitles are also known as ‘captions’. Below is a list of how adding these to your videos can enormously help out your SEO.
1) There’s more text for search engines to look through which can divert more traffic to your site.
2) Studies show that transcripts and subtitles increase engagement and the completion rate at which viewers watch the video from 40% to 80%. This particularly important because Google rewards videos and pages that have longer view times.
3) Transcripts offer new opportunities to target additional keywords so it’s a great way for each transcript page to have their own SEO strategy.
4) YouTube and Google allow their users to filter searches for videos that have closed captions.
5) On YouTube captions influence search rank. If a word is mentioned in the subtitle but not in the title, description or tag, it can still be found, thus improving your video ‘searchability.’
Don’t take our word for it. Check out the experiments!
SafeNet wanted to test video transcripts effects on SEO. On the third week of their experiment, their video was found to be on the first page of Yahoo and Bing.
A study done by This American Life (TAL) showed that after adding transcripts to their videos, there was a 3.89% increase in inbound links that were found to be a direct cause of the transcript pages and there was a 6.68% increase in of unique visitors through organic search.
In Discovery Digital Networks’ experiment, they found that that 14 days after adding closed captions, there was a 13.48% increase of views.
So yes videos do improve SEO, but why stop there? Why not go further and get the right agency to transcribe and subtitle your videos? The benefits are too good to ignore.