Using Captions and Transcripts to Improve SEO and Standout In All Digital World

Companies are using captions and transcripts to improve SEO and standout amongst the competition in a world that has gone digital. Two decades ago, that sentiment filled some people with fear, some with excitement as technology entered our daily lives in new and transformative ways. Now, in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the digital world is a source of comfort, connection, and continued productivity as we collectively hunker down, stay inside, and wait for the virus to pass.

What’s left in the wake of this tidal wave of change is the need to perform almost all daily human interaction online. Thank goodness for technology in times like these. Applications like Zoom and GoToMeeting are allowing us to keep schools, businesses, and relationships afloat.

Another change we’re seeing across the board is the invigorated adoption of digital marketing strategies. Companies now seek to find new clients and customers in a world where face to face interaction is no longer an option.

Video captions and transcripts have been imperative as learning institutions move their education online, but they also have the added ability to improve SEO and online conversions in the digital marketing space.

Using Captions and Transcripts for SEO Improvement

Captions and transcripts play a strong role in your overall SEO performance. But because the web is built for text, not video or audio content, search engines like Google require a text-based version of your content in order to crawl, rank and index any pages on your site containing non-text-based materials.

There are a number of other components that also impact your sites SEO, all of which are also connected to audio transcripts:

• website security and accessibility
• page loading speed
• mobility
• website page copy
• website age
• your coding
• how visitors interact with your site
• inbound and outbound linking
• social sharing

Captions and transcripts contribute to a number of these areas – including your site accessibility, your page loading speed, your website copy and content, and how visitors interact with your site.

Page Loading Speed

Using videos on your site can negatively impact page load times, even while boosting engagement and conversions. This is caused by increased bandwidth requirements, video optimization failure, and how many different “elements” you include on each page. To ensure page loading times are optimal it’s imperative that you have correct transcriptions of your media files and that you make sure your videos are correctly formatted on your site.

Site Content and Copy

Your audio and video transcripts offer you ready-made text to include on your web pages – either as a direct copy and paste of the transcript or by being repurposed into new content. Some ideas for repurposing content include eBooks, blogs, checklists, and many other items. This circles back to your SEO, as well, by providing more content on your website on a given topic, thereby increasing the number of important keywords being used.

Correct Coding

Your website must be coded properly with page titles, H1, and H2 tags, metadata, image alt tags, and others. All cielo24 transcripts come with a list of keywords that you can then use to optimize your site coding.

Visitor Interaction and Increased Conversions

Including video on your website pages – especially captioned videos – has been shown to improve landing page conversions up to 85%. Search engines look at things like click-thru rates, dwell times, and bounce rates to calculate your SEO ranking.

How High Accuracy Accessible Captions and Transcripts Boost SEO and Conversions

With everyone now forced to connect with each other in a digital format, it’s more important than ever before to provide accessible online content. Even if your company isn’t required by law to do so, you could really alienate a large part of your market by not making your website accessible to them due to their disabilities or language barriers.

You can get captions and transcription for your online media outsourced through either machine transcription (sometimes known as Automatic Speech Recognition or ASR) or human-verified transcription.

Many companies start with machine transcriptions because of the significantly reduced price and extremely fast turnaround times. But the lack of high accuracy with machine transcription can impact its overall effect and it’s impact to your SEO. The unavoidable inaccuracies made in machine transcriptions – missed or misunderstood words that can skew keywords and make your content readability less than desirable without manual editing – can even damage your overall SEO by missing important keyword opportunities.

Because of these machine-based errors, ASR auto-captions do not meet federal requirements for accessibility – which state the text must recreate the auditory experience of the unimpaired viewer or listener. You needhighly accurate transcripts and captions if you are subject to ADA compliance or interested in reaching your hearing-impaired audience.

cielo24 Solutions for Video Captions and Transcripts

Our Enterprise-level accounts help companies comply with WCAG standards and are built around your specific video needs. They come with the help of an account executive, as well as opening you up to our full suite of features like 16+ foreign language translations, advanced media data, and our video wrapper.

Our Self Serve web app allows you to get started ordering video transcripts and captions immediately, without the wait for contracts or quotes. All new users are given one free mechanical transcription, and can then order more machine or human-verified captions and transcripts for less than a dollar per minute.

For more information on our video transcription, captioning, and video intelligence solutions, contact us online or call us at 1-855-243-5624.

cielo24 is removing barriers to increase video marketing ROI, searchability, and compliance for all your videos!

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