Want to Make Money Off of YouTube? Improve YouTube Performance Through Video Captions and Transcripts

If you’re trying to make money off of YouTube it’s important that you consider video captions and transcripts as a key component of your strategy.  Without a doubt, your audience – whoever they are – go on YouTube. Accurate, high-quality video captions and transcripts will help your videos stand out amongst the competition and help you monetize your YouTube profile.

The first step to making money off your YouTube account is to make sure that your videos can be found. To do this you have to boost your internal YouTube SEO. The following tips will help you boost video discovery, engagement, and reach based on the advice from leading have been YouTube experts around the world.

Take These Steps to Increase Your YouTube Reach

1. Apply YouTube Metadata

Metadata is the foundation of SEO of your YouTube videos. Your tags, titles, descriptions, thumbnails, closed captions, playlists, and links tell YouTube where to rank your videos in their search queries. Using accurate tags, titles, and descriptions will ensure that your viewers know that your video relates to their search.

Second to metadata, YouTube will then look at user engagement signals like the number of subscribers and comments to rank your videos.

2. Use Video Keywords In YouTube Metadata 

First, you want to make sure your keywords are relevant to what your video is about and useful to the searcher. Second, you want to focus on video keywords (these are keywords that bring up YouTube video results on the first page of a Google search) so that you rank on Google, as well.

Consider the following video keywords:

• How-to keywords (“how to cut your husband’s hair”)
• Reviews (“House Party review”)
• Tutorials (“Setting up Zoom”)
• Anything fitness or sports related (“online yoga for stress relief”)
• Funny videos (“funny cats”)

A quick search in Google will help you find more information on video keywords. Remember to focus on keywords that get at least 300 searches per month to optimize your efforts.

3. Include Captions and Subtitles on YouTube

Captions provide a text component to your video which allows search engines, such as Google, to index your video. Another benefit of captions and transcripts on YouTube videos is the accessibility they provide for hard of hearing audiences, which make up 15% of the population. Subtitles can also expand your audience reach to non-English speakers and allow your videos to rank in non-English searches.  

Look here for more information on adding YouTube Captions, there is a great article here.

4. Put Your Video Transcription in the Description

Adding your video transcription to the video description is another way to tell search engines what your video is about. The title and meta tags will not be enough to make your video rank highly. To truly improve YouTube monetization and SEO you need an accurate, formatted transcription placed within the video description section.

5. Improve Your Video Watch Time

User engagement is very important toward YouTube SEO and includes signals like shares, comments, likes, links, subscribers, watch time, etc.

One important signal is watch time. Your YouTube video earns one view after it’s been watched for 30 seconds or longer. Watch time refers to the time spent watching a video and not the percent of time watched. Encourage high watch times by hooking your viewer in the first 10 seconds.

Video captions are also shown to increase watch time. Captioning research has found that watch times double when closed captions are added to videos.

And finally, accurately titling, tagging, and describing your videos will improve watch time. If someone clicks your videos, sees the first few seconds and realizes it’s not what they thought it would be, SEO goes down. 

cielo24 YouTube Integrations for Video Captions and Transcripts

cielo24 has a direct YouTube integration for all of our users.

Our Enterprise-level accounts link directly to your YouTube account and videos that you caption through your Enterprise dashboard will be automatically loaded into your YouTube profile. Enterprise level captioning and transcription also helps companies comply with WCAG standards and can be built around your specific video needs. These accounts come with the help of a dedicated account executive, as well as opening you up to our full suite of features, including 16+ foreign language translations, advanced media data, and our video wrapper.

Our Self Serve web app also allows you to apply captions to YouTube videos. Self Serve members can add highly accurate, high-quality captions to their YouTube videos by taking these 3 steps:

1. Copy and paste the URL of your desired YouTube video in your Self Serve file upload screen
2. Select your accuracy and turnaround times and run the video through the captioning process
3. Retrieve your .srt file and add it to your already uploaded video file in YouTube

Self Serve members can also get started ordering video transcripts and captions immediately, without the wait for contracts or quotes. All new users are given one free 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.