Did you know that 69% of people see videos with the sound off in public places?
Video marketing has undoubtedly become the favorite way for marketers to promote their brands. With more than half the population watching videos without sound, adding subtitles to a video is now a must.
Subtitles not only make the video SEO-friendly but also reaches a wider audience since you can embed them in any/multiple languages. This lets you cover audiences across varying demographics. Plus, with technology at aid, it has become easier to transcribe audio to text.
You can transcribe audio to text in two ways:
- Manually
- Using subtitle generators
The former way is a thing of the past since there are many automatic subtitles generators available in the market. Happy Scribe’s automatic subtitling services are one such service that converts audio to text with 85-90% accuracy within minutes.
However, adding subtitles is one way of optimizing your video content. You can choose the service that aligns with your business and budget requirements.
In this article, we will go through five ways to optimize the video content. However, before jumping directly into the ways of optimizing video content, let us try to understand why adding subtitles is beneficial to your business.
Why should you add subtitles to your video?
Creating SEO-optimized content for your website has become necessary to even survive as a business in this digital world. Because, if Google won’t recognize your brand, how will the viewers?
Now, if we look at the technical aspect of adding subtitles to a video, we know that it makes the video SEO-friendly. Every business’ end goal is conversion rates. However, how will it help your business generate revenue? We have listed a few points that will let you know why should you add subtitles to your videos:
1. Increases engagement
By adding subtitles to your video, you add one more element to your content for viewers to enjoy. The video must have audio and visuals. After you add text to it, the viewing experience becomes more holistic and the viewers are more likely to enjoy it.
2. Reaches wider audience
Let’s say you have created a fashion video in English. The best advantage of adding captions is that you can add them in multiple languages. So the people who are non-native can also enjoy your content. This increases viewership and eventually, engagement.
3. Makes video searchable
Once you add subtitles to a video, Google identifies it which increases the chances of organic viewership. More and more people can discover your site.
You now know the benefits of adding subtitles to videos. However, this is yet the first step to optimizing the videos. In this article, we will walk through five ways to actually do so.
5 Ways you can optimize your video content by automatic subtitles generator
You know how to add subtitles and why to add them. Now, it is time to know how to do it in a way that actually enhances content optimization. We have listed five ways of optimizing video content by automatic subtitle generators.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
1. Embed the text properly
Around one-third of traffic comes from organic search. This means when a user goes to google to YouTube and searches for a topic, then your video should be visible among the top 5 links unless it is not SEO-optimized.
Now, SEO-optimized is rather a very broad term. You may consider your job done after you add subtitles to your video content. However, that is not simply enough.
Whether you choose to manually transcribe audio to text (although you should avoid doing this) or use a subtitle generator, you need to ensure to properly align the text with the audio. If the audio and text are not aligned, adding subtitles will in fact prove to be a bad choice since it will make the whole viewing experience clumsy.
Hence, it is important to match the text frame by frame with the audio and video to get the best out of it. You can either add them as a .srt file or you can upload the file onto whichever video platform you use.
Pointer: Automatic subtitle generators work best as they help you save time.
2. Optimize video titles and description
Optimizing video titles simply means adding related keywords and phrases so that the search engine recognizes them. Similarly, adding keywords to the video description makes it searchable.
This will increase organic traffic and attract new visitors. Moreover, you can use tags with keywords related to your topic to make your video SEO-friendly.
The first step to embedding keywords is identifying them. Once you identify the keywords, the first place you should be inserting a target keyword is in your file name.
The logic behind this is–YouTube cannot watch the video content but can read the file name. The most commonly searched keywords on YouTube contain terms like “review”, “tutorial” and “how-to”.
The videos with these keyphrases reserve a spot on the first page of Google. By optimizing your metadata with such keyphrases, you get targeted traffic directly to your page.
3. Use the right platform to host your video
You might be aware of the demand for self-hosting your video. It is beneficial in terms of storage space and resources. Videos require more bandwidth than images and they require more data stream compared to other visual components too.
This directly impacts the performance of the website since the page will now take longer to load.
This is why it is recommended to use platforms like YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo. With these platforms, hosting videos becomes low maintenance and your videos can be made available at a much lower cost.
4. Upload custom thumbnails
Did you know that 90% of the best performing videos have custom thumbnails?
What is the first thing that a viewer sees when s/he searches for a video on YouTube? Well, it’s a thumbnail. Viewers are more likely to click on a video with an engaging thumbnail. It attracts the eyes of the visitors leading to an increase in the number of views.
Plus, creating visually appealing thumbnails is not that difficult. You only need a little image editing skills and you are good to go.
5. Embed the video to a relevant blog page
Google pays extreme attention to the intent of the text and video. For instance, if your blog post talks all about the specs of your new product and you add a video of clients’ testimonials in the middle of it, it is less likely for Google to find it. So, when you decide to embed a video into your blog post, do consider the link between the text and the content.
For semantic value addition to your content, you should embed subtitles to the video. This optimizes the content even more and makes the content more contextual. Google will rank pages with more semantic values higher.
Wrapping up ways to optimize video content
While these methods come with no guarantee of increasing viewership, they sure direct you towards a path to achieving that. Also, these tips come into the picture once your content part is sorted because quality content with the best SEO practices combines work to give you the desired results.
So, your primary focus must be on creating quality content. This includes a well-thought video and high-quality audio visuals. Once you have a solid content game, implementing SEO practices will certainly work. The key is to give importance to both these aspects.
Author Bio:
Parita Pandya is an Engineer turned Writer. She usually finds herself writing for businesses. When she is not writing, she is either strumming her guitar or penning her thoughts down on paritapandya.com.
