Recent studies have discovered something surprising about the use of closed captioning for video content created for search engine optimization (SEO): it’s surprisingly effective.
According to a July 29 Business2Community article, adding closed captioning and transcripts to a video can increase “traffic, page views, search rank, and engagement.”
In a Discovery Digital Networks study that measured the impact of captioning on web videos, videos with closed captioning saw a 13.48% growth in views and a lifetime increase of views by 7.32%, according to Business2Community.
In addition to causing an increase in the number of views a video gets, closed captioning can also help a video move up the ranks in search engine results faster, which is what every SEO strategy tries to attain.
Closed captioning is able to grow a video’s SEO ranking so powerfully because adding a transcript of the video can help boost keyword density and diversity, according to the Business2Community article.
Creating video content for the web is also beneficial to businesses because of the potential for metrics and monitoring of the video’s impact on the web, Business2Community reports.
With all this in mind, closed captioning on video content for SEO could well become the norm.