Four reasons to add captions to your videos
Are you producing videos for your business? Read on for four reasons why you need to add captions to them.
Video content with no closed content (CC) is similar to a concert pianist playing in an empty hall. Imagine you strived hard to create an interesting video but without something that grabs your audience’s full attention.
Not creating video content without captions is no longer a viable option in today’s extremely digital world. Undoubtedly, people all over the world are engaging with video content continuously, and they have diverse needs, lifestyles, and ways to access video and streams.
But with captioned video content, you can reach all of them without any further ado! Let’s look at the top reasons why adding captions to your videos is crucial today.
Reason 1: Make your content engaging (with or without sound)
As we all are on the go, we don’t always want to be earsplitting sound from our devices—whether they be smartphones or laptops. Adding captions makes videos and streams much easier for a broad array of audiences to watch, wherever they’re and whatever they’re doing.
Whether you are on public transport without headphones, in a quiet place where you can’t play the sound, or just want to read along, captions help people engage more easily.
Reason 2: Boost your audience attention and exposure
To easily catch and retain your audience’s attention, it’s necessary to add captions to videos because videos with captions have an extended viewing time. These extended viewing times not only assist you in conveying your message but also make your content rank better on the SERPs.
Captions also improve viewers’ reading skills by offering learning readers more coverage of the written word, as multiple studies have shown.
For viewers whose native language isn’t English, adding diverse language-based captions to videos improves comprehension by enabling them to read what’s going on in the video. It means that you can expand your audience to overseas markets and others whose second language is English, just by using captions.
Reason 3: Improve your content’s accessibility
More than 5% of the world’s population has major hearing loss or problems. That’s a large proportion of people – about 460 million – who won’t have access to your content if you don’t add captions to your videos.
Captions will support and engage your deaf or hard-of-hearing audience so that they can follow your content. Be sure that the more accurate and detail-oriented captions are the better way to grab your audience’s attention.
Along with adding captions, there are other significant ways to improve the accessibility of your video content, such as transcription and audio description. If you want to make your content accessible to your audience, these effective avenues work the best.
Reason 4: Capitalize on your SEO and content with transcripts
The last but not least reason to make captioned content is the final product of the captioning process—transcription. If done professionally, captions can also be turned into transcripts.
Having a transcript of your content enables a video or stream to be visible on the search engines which include Google, through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search can’t watch or listen to videos and index their content; however, they do index transcripts.
That’s why whenever you add captions to your videos, you need to make your video transcript or highlights so that you’ll rank high on the SERP. As a result, your videos will gain more views and exposure.
