Closed captions can take your YouTube channel to the next level. More views, more revenue, more subscribers, more likes and comments. It’s an easy and powerful tool that too often gets overlooked.
How to closed captions enhance YouTube videos?
- Allows your audience to view your video with the sound off (stat about sounds off video)
- Improved SEO by providing more keywords for search engine algorithms to crawl
- Increased average video watch time (stat)
- Improved engagement rates
- More accessible video content for deaf and hard of hearing individuals
- Increased global audience with translated subtitles (link to translated subtitles)
All these benefits can be summarized into one: a better performing video.
So how can you add professional captions to your YouTube videos?
How to use SubCaptioner to create closed captions for your YouTube videos
YouTube auto-captions vs. professional closed captions
You might be wondering: “Doesn’t YouTube automatically generate captions for videos”?
The answer is yes. YouTube has a feature for creators that automatically generates closed captions for videos. It’s free and is partnered with an editing tool that allows channel creators to edit these captions manually. Although this is an easy way to add closed captions to YouTube videos, there are two main problems.
1. YouTube’s automatically generated captions are not crawled for keywords by search engines. This means that these captions won’t help to boost your video’s SEO or your overall video performance.
2. YouTube’s automatically generated captions are only on average 70% accurate, and manually editing each video is very time-consuming. If you use YouTube’s captions without editing them,
you may decrease the quality of your hard work.
Professional closed captions, on the other hand, are crawled by search engines for keywords and are highly accurate. When a professional SRT file is added to a YouTube video, search engines can crawl through the main keywords in your video and ensure that the video ranks highly for those words and phrases. If you add a translated subtitle file, your video can also get crawled for foreign language keywords. This helps your video to rank highly in other countries as well.
Closed captions created by human captioning professionals are highly accurate but at a significant cost. SubCaptioner uses industry-leading automated speech recognition technology to convert speech to text with up to 99% accuracy, depending on audio quality, so usually, no extra editing time is required, and your costs are significantly lower with much less effort on your part.
Ready to try out professional captions? Get started with SubCaptioner.
