SEO and Accessibility: How Captions Help Your Videos Rank Better?

What would Friends (an American television sitcom) be without the “pivot” scene? Now, imagine watching Ross’s exasperated tone, those perfectly timed punchlines and the group’s reaction with sound down or no captions or subtitles. 

The humor and context will be lost. Similarly, in the online space, captions do much more than enhancing the viewing experience. They provide search engines with valuable text data, making your videos more discoverable. Adding captions ensures everyone understands the moment while increasing your video’s SEO.

So, how do video captions impact your SEO to ensure your video content reaches hundreds of thousands of customers and ranks on search engines?

How Video Captions Benefit Your SEO Strategy

Captions offer a multitude of advantages that go far beyond inclusivity and accessibility. Among these, their effect on your SEO strategy is what makes a true game-changer. The benefits range from higher watch time and improved user experience to rich search engine snippets and enhanced global audience reach. Let’s explore these and some other benefits of video captions:

They increase the watch time of your videos

Captions contribute to lengthier video engagement because they make your content more relevant and accessible. 

Video SEO rankings depend on how long customers watch your videos. Because search engines aim to provide superior content matching customer expectations, a higher watch time helps search engines recognize videos with higher quality and better relevance. Your video garners favorable SEO rankings.

Pro-tip: Add clear, concise captions and ensure they sync perfectly with your video to maximize customer retention.

They enhance your user experience

Captions are a powerful tool that improves user experience across different settings. These tools work best for customers with hearing disabilities, non-native speakers of the language, and people watching in noise-sensitive areas such as public places or work environments. 

When customers receive accessible and engaging content, they will interact with it by sharing, liking and commenting. Positive customer interactions with your content signal its value to search engines, improving search engine rankings.

Pro-tip: Include a strong call-to-action in your videos to encourage viewers to engage further, increasing interaction and SEO performance.

They make your content readable to search engines

When search engines crawl videos, they take into account only external information like engagement rate, watch time, length of the video and more, without actually analyzing its content. Your work and video success depend on factors out of your control.

As search engines like Google rely on text-based content to index web pages and understand video topics, adding video subtitles and captions creates a wealth of searchable text.

Example:

A video featuring pasta cooking tips with captions can include keywords like "best pasta recipe" or "quick dinner tips." These phrases help your video get indexed and appear in relevant search results.

Without captions, your rich data remains inaccessible to search engines.

They let you add keywords of your choice

Pretty much every SEO article you read stresses the importance of adding relevant keywords to your content. And, the same holds for your videos. Without keywords, search engines are never going to understand what your content is about. Video captions allow you to naturally include keywords without appearing forced. Keywords improve your video’s probability of getting discovered by your target audience. 

Example:

Captions in fitness videos can include "home workout routines" or "beginner fitness tips" as keywords. A travel vlog can use terms such as "budget travel tips" together with "top destinations 2024" and "hidden travel gems." 

Targeted phrases make the vlog more accessible and help it rank higher in search engine results, driving more traffic.

Pro-tip: Optimize your video captions by including long-tail keywords that match your audience’s search queries.

They bring you backlink opportunities

Photo by Damien Lusson

Another relatively lesser-known SEO benefit of video captions is that it offers new backlink building opportunities. Videos with captions offer context for bloggers, publishers, website owners and content creators to reach out to your website for backlink opportunities. 

Your domain authority increases with an increase in the number of backlinks. A higher DA leads to more organic traffic. 

Example: The captions from your cooking video can provide food bloggers with information to add your video as a reference in their content.

Pro-tip: Add subtitles or captions that are timed correctly and accurately. Your viewers might become displeased and lose trust if they experience bad synchronization or inaccurate audio captions. Use high-quality video caption generators for polished and professional work.

They help you create rich snippets

Captions form the building blocks for creating rich snippets, also called featured snippets. These snippets are a summary of content a search engine displays for the apex search engine result pages. Such heightened visibility captures customers’ attention more effectively and encourages more clicks, driving engagement. 

Often, customers read these summaries to determine whether or not to click on a website or video.

Pro-tip: Use well-written captions to make your videos more engaging in search results.

They reduce your bounce rate

Captions make videos more accessible for everyone—whether someone is hearing impaired or prefers watching without sound. They keep customers hooked by giving them another way to consume your video content, ensuring they don’t leave your video prematurely. This reduces the bounce rate.

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of customers who navigate away from the webpage after viewing a single page. In other words, the metrics provide information about customers who leave your video or webpage without interacting or exploring the content. A higher bounce rate indicates to search engines that the content is irrelevant. As a result, search engines push back your content in the SERPs.

Pro-tip: Proofread and edit your captions for accuracy as mistakes can increase the bounce rate.

Add Captions to Your Videos Like Never Before

Photo by Monica Flores on Unsplash

In the era of AI, when Google and search engines constantly change their ranking algorithms, even the smallest SEO straw matters. And, video captions are an under-estimated asset, which marketing agencies, content creators and business owners are yet to use to its full potential.

Captioning your videos fills the wide gap between accessibility and discoverability. Get started by captioning your videos with a professional video caption generator like QuickSubs. The tool auto-generates subtitles and captions apart from suggesting video titles and keywords.

Quicksubs takes video captions to the next level by allowing you to add music and customize the captions colors and placements as needed.

Generate captions to see how it impacts your video performance, ranks your video higher in the SERPs, and engages customers better.