As a marketer, you probably know how important video content is to your content marketing. 

With the rise of technology, customer behavior has seen a drastic change. Videos are what modern customers want. But does creating, uploading, and marketing a video alone suffice? 

To ensure customers notice your videos over your competitors, video SEO is necessary. For converting your videos into SEO gold, it's important to add subtitles to ensure customers see your videos in their newsfeed on social media platforms.

However, SEO is a tough nut to crack because it requires precise technical and semantic optimizations. 

To make your life easier, we discuss the importance of subtitles for optimizing your content. 

Let's explore and dive in!

The Importance of Subtitles for Optimizing Your Content

Here are a few reasons why subtitles are important for optimizing your content:

1.  Subtitles Make Your Content Readable by Search Engines

When a search engine analyzes a video, it scrawls external information like engagement rate, video length, and view duration without considering or analyzing the content.

This is a big turnoff for creators because their efforts in creating a video and its content go waste. Fortunately, to make your content readable by Google and other search engines, add subtitles to a video with Happy Scribe. 

Interestingly, when you add subtitles in an external format like VTT and SRT, it sends search engine information to read your content for keyword relevance.

This technical optimization in your content can increase traffic to your videos and ensure more readers view your marketing videos.

Point to remember: When you add subtitles to your video, it becomes easier for Google to read and rank your videos. So, start adding subtitles today!

2.  Subtitles Increase Engagement

After users find your videos, you expect them to watch them till the end. Your video's watch time determines the search ranking on YouTube. Longer watch time relates to a higher SERP ranking. 

Also, your video's search engine ranking is impacted by how well it performs in engaging your target customers. Performance metrics like bounce rate and click rate tell Google and search engines that you are sharing high-quality videos. So, such videos get ranked higher for appropriate search terms.

Adding subtitles increases your engagement in many ways. When your video content aligns with users' search queries, they are likely to view it until the end. If your content is what viewers are looking for and your subtitles and captions reflect this, viewers have one more reason to watch your videos. 

Interestingly, adding subtitles in an external format like VTT and SRT sends search engine information to read your content for keyword relevance.

Point to remember: Adding subtitles increases the chance of a viewer watching your content to completion rather than saving it for later and possibly never watching it again.

3.  Subtitles Increase External Link Opportunities

A little-known benefit of using subtitles is attracting new opportunities to redirect links to your website. 

As a subtitled video is far more engaging than normal text, it might attract different sites to embed your video in their blogs and articles.

They might want to share your videos with their readers based on their relevance. This provides you with free external links that might help in boosting your global SEO and domain authority. 

So, add subtitles using Clideo and reach your target audience.

Point to remember: Companies looking to grow their online presence cannot afford to overlook the importance of adding subtitles to each video they share.

4.  Subtitles Ensure Brand Focus on Consumer Preference

Have you ever scrolled through your Facebook videos on mute while your better half or children slept soundly next to you? Or have you decided to glance at your feed during a boring lecture? 

Or have you ever tried to watch videos while traveling on a bus or train?

In these scenarios, it's not socially acceptable to watch videos out loud. Interestingly, such customers might be a sizable chunk of your target audience.

With 85% of Facebook videos watched on mute, it makes complete sense to caption your videos. This means that consumers might skip your videos if you don't include subtitles. 

Point to remember: If you want your target audience to view your content irrespective of how, when, and where you watch it, then do your part by adding subtitles to every video you share.

5.  Subtitles Improve User Experience (UX) And User Engagement

Apart from providing semantic relevance, search engines like Google can assess your video based on the performance level. The more a reader pushes for engagement like likes and comments, the better would be your video ranking.
 

Interestingly, subtitles can enhance your website's user experience. Here the benefit of adding a subtitle is to enhance the visual impact of your video. This helps a viewer react directly to your words and take necessary actions.

By adding more subtitled videos, you provide visual and interactive content that can help in retaining the viewer's attention for a longer time.

Point to remember: Excellent UX and user engagement is the key to success in optimizing your content and reaching the desired audience base.

Tools for Adding Subtitles to Your Content

Use these tools for adding subtitles to your video content:

1.   Happy Scribe

Happy Scribe is an intelligent and AI-powered automatic transcription tool that helps you generate subtitles. Using this tool, you can generate subtitles in more than 60 different languages to connect with audiences around the globe. This helps in removing the language barrier. 

Happy Scribe is a top priority for most businesses because it boasts an 85% accuracy in transcription. This is an intuitive tool that helps you customize your captions and change the color, font, and position of your subtitles. You can even format the titles based on your requirement.

2.  Clideo

Clideo is a unique platform that allows you to add subtitles to your video files. The platform allows you to add subtitles or an SRT subtitle file manually. In both cases, you can edit them and select a font and its size and align the text with the video. 

What makes Clideo more interesting is that it allows you to save your video or movie with subtitles in any desired format like AVI, MP4, and MOV.

You can even choose the color and background of the subtitles to make it look brighter and more appealing in the video. As this tool is entirely online, you don't need to download any software or app to your device.

3.  Veed.io

Another interesting tool that you can use to add subtitles is Veed.io. The tool allows you to add subtitles manually, upload a subtitle file and even auto transcribe the videos. You have to choose a file to upload, and the software will take care of everything else.

It allows you to make super-easy edits, click on the text and start making the desired changes. With Veed.io, you can watch changes happen in real-time. You can even edit text, font, color, size, and timing.

4.   Kapwing

Kapwing is a subtitle creation tool that helps you add subtitles to your videos with no watermark. 

As videos on social media receive greater engagement than videos without subtitles, it's essential to use tools like Kapwing to increase reach and enhance user engagement. Kapwing's editor allows you to burn subtitles into your video so that subtitles appear on the platform the video gets shared to. 

The company uses AI-powered auto-generate features for subtitles. Interestingly, this machine-powered transition is an excellent way to subtitle a video in half the time. It allows you to adjust the font, size, color, and position of the subtitles in your video.

Using Kapwing, you can use different subtitling styles, such as a full background to make your subtitles readable or a text shadow or no background.

Add Subtitles to Your Video and Dominate the Search Engines

Regardless of whether you're trying to boost the ranking on search engines or supercharge your marketing efforts, adding subtitles to your video is a must for every business.

While transcribing video content doesn't consume much time, it can become challenging as your content library grows more extensive with each video you upload.

So, using a professional transcription service like Happy Scribe or Clideo, you can make as many transcriptions as possible without wasting too much time. 

While you might be apprehensive about using a professional service, subtitles serve as the Holy Grail of your video content, and organizations cannot afford to overlook the importance of adding subtitles. 

When creating a video, don't spend too much time and effort creating the perfect video and leave out the Holy Grail. If this happens, you might not be able to reach as many people as you want.

Well-captioned and subtitled content boosts user engagement, increases your views, enhances video comprehension, and ensures success on social media platforms.

Author’s Bio:

Priya Jain has been copywriting professionally for over 8 years. She teaches math, spends her time running behind her toddler, and tries new recipes whilst she isn't writing. She has attained an engineering degree, and an MBA. You can find her on LinkedIn.