Will subtitling Youtube video Be worthwhile?
-
We've been thinking that maybe it would be beneficial in terms of SEO to supply our YouTube videos with CC / subtitles.
Unfortunately, this is very time consuming, so we would like to know, basically, if it's worthwhile.
Does any of you have any expectations or even experience with this, you'd like to share with us?
-
We typically encourage our clients to caption any video they put on the web. I do not know the exact metrics to SEO rank jumping based on captions vs non-captions. That could be a experiment for Moz and their lab. In my experience though, it's a benefit beyond just the simple SEO. It's about general accessibility.
1st off, Google will try and auto caption your video whether you want them to or not. Typically it does an absolutely horrible job. So if someone is trying to watch your video with captions, it may make little to no sense.
2nd, Google will take those captions and translate them into any language it needs. Much like a bad game of telephone, we have found that bad translations just keep getting worse as google auto translates them.
3rd, it's been mentioned a few times that google does in fact scrape and index captions. They are what tells google what your video is about because Google doesn't have the AI intelligence to watch and understand. At least not until it goes full skynet and takes over. Here are a few links that may help.
http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo
http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-closed-captions-seo/
http://www.3playmedia.com/2014/01/10/future-accessibility-video-captions-according-google-youtube/On an implementation note, there are a few different ways to ease the burden.
- If it's script based it's easily upload-able yourself. While youtube is fairly awful at understanding, it can listen and align pretty well. If we have a script we simple copy and paste and are good to go.
- Hire out a professional transcription subtitle person. We do these on large scale projects. They transcribe and send us a nice and clean .srt file that we upload directly to youtube.
- Errand services. I have had friends that use services like Task Rabbit to hire out people to do the work. Never underestimate the power of 50 bucks when someone can type up a few things from home while sitting in their underwear.
- INTERNS! I'm sure nothing pleases an intern more than to sit in a dark room transcribing video all day long. I'm fairly positive it's what they live for... at least that's what are interns say when we are not forcing them to battle to the death with nerf swords.
-
I've never used this strategy personally but I have heard that Google will read the captions and use the text for ranking purposes. I've also seen articles mentioning this as a best practice for Youtube SEO. I don't have a specific source though, so hopefully someone with more experience will be able to help.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will using display:none; to hide images hurt SEO?
A popular trend among bloggers right now is to hide their long images for social media (Pinterest) using the code. This makes it so that when a reader clicks the Pin it browser button, the long image still shows up but is not displayed inside their post. Also note that the alt description for Pinterest marketers are always keyword rich, board line keyword stuffed. I've read this article from Google on hiding text and images https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en but not sure if this practice fits inside that scope. What are your thoughts? Will this hurt SEO?
Social Media | | klhill0 -
Will Facebook traffic hurt our SEO? Should we put our blog on the core domain or sub domain?
We are concerned that social traffic could hurt our SEO. What do you think... Our average time on site from organic search traffic is 7 minutes. Facebook traffic has an average time on site of 1 minute. Both traffic sources are going to different pages. If we generate 3 times as much traffic from Facebook as we do from google this will pull down our overall average time on site and engagement levels big time. Should we put our blog on the core domain or a subdomain? Right now we are holding back on promoting on facebook because we are concerned it could hurt our SEO, what do you think? Should we try to get as much traffic as possible from Facebook even though the engagement is much lower? Should we put our blog which is generating the low engagement traffic from facebook on the core domain or a subdomain?
Social Media | | rvshare0 -
YouTube Channels - Geotargeting - UK & US specific YT channels (but with identical videos)
Can you have one for each region such as Uk & US like you might with FaceBook etc: I know its a good idea for Geo-targeting reasons to have country specific social pages to promote country specific websites (i.e. UK FaceBook for .co.uk website and US Facebook for .com site etc), does the same apply to YouTube ? Does YouTube allow this (since videos will be effectively the same on both channels) ? I would hope so since say if you wanted to exploit annotated links to the main site from the videos then you would want the US viewer following a link to a US product page not a UK page and vice versa ? Many Thanks Dan
Social Media | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Using youtube videos to rank for queries in the serps as well as youtube
I have some youtube videos of my business and some of them are ranking organically as well as for queries in youtube. Would it be wise to start naming more of my videos long tale key search phrases and uploading them to youtube to get them to rank organically and on youtube? what is the best way to optimize these videos? key phrases in the description as well as title of the video? How do i get them to rank on youtube as well as in the serps? just get lots of views or do links to my video help? Thanks mozzers! Ron
Social Media | | Ron100 -
I want to upload one of my youtube videos to my Google+ Account.
I want to include videos from my youtube channel on Google+. Does this mean I have to save the video file on my PC at first and then upload it?
Social Media | | knielsen0 -
Benefits and cons of hosting video content vs hosting via youtube
Hi if a site is hosting its own videos (not embedding them on youtube) is there less benefits then getting youtube to host it, and then embedding the youtube video. For instance: For benefits such as building channel authority, easy to rank the video in the search engines hosted on youtube, better opportunity to increase visitors and traffic and higher chance for the video to spread and rank for the keyword when hosted on youtube. What do you guys think?
Social Media | | monster990 -
Should I post these viral videos/photos on my website?
I started posting viral videos and stuff that I found on reddit and youtube on my facebook fan page. It's getting a lot of attention and creating more opportunities for bonding with my fans/customers. I'm just wondering what you guys think about reposting some of this stuff on my blog...do you think it would be worth the time and effort? I've experimented with a few and it really does draw traffic to my site...and gets me facebook shares. But the traffic is very poorly converting. So, now I'm trying to decide if the extra time it takes (i.e. 5-10 minutes to write a blog post and include the video imbed code vs. 20 seconds to just hit the "share" button) is worth it. What do you think?
Social Media | | MarieHaynes0