These are the questions businesses have when it comes to prioritising accessibility of content. The answers lie in captioning and transcription.
According to Forbes, the average user spends 88% more time on a website with video than without. But if the videos they’re watching are neither captioned nor provide a transcript, much of the effect is lost, along with audiences in environments where audio isn’t accessible.
Captions are “typically located at the bottom of a video screen...[and] allow viewers to follow along with the audio and video or captions interchangeably.”
Transcripts are either in verbatim or clean text form. Either way, both provide the speech and audio from a video in one plain-text document. “Clean read transcription edits the text to read more fluidly, perfect for unscripted content like interviews or recorded speaking events.”
The benefits are essentially limitless, and this blog-post, we will go through some of the key ways these methods can help your business.
This is a fundamental reason for providing captions. With over 5% of the world’s population having disabling hearing loss, captions can provide much more accessibility to those people, expanding your market much further.
As videos hit the internet, it became much more difficult for Google (and other search engines) to “crawl” content to discover new and updated pages to add to the Google index.
An easy way to do this, at first, was updating metadata of posts, but due to restrictions on metadata, the information you can provide is limited. Lucky for you, captioning and transcribing videos is an easy way to make content more “visible” for Googlebot.
You content may be over-spilling with brilliant, innovative content but it’s easy to miss key information if they zone out. If you provide captions, their attention is grabbed, kept for longer and they’re more likely to remember it long after they’ve watched it.
On average captioned videos see a 40% increase in viewing engagement.
This is ideal when creating ‘explainer’ videos. In one transcript of a video, you can mention so much content, enough to off-shoot to other videos, therefore making more and more… and BOOM! Time spent on your site increases.
By extracting valuable points from your transcript, you can make shareable social graphics, link-building, and publish topic blog posts.
Without captions, you risk losing viewers, derivative content, and you may not get indexed effectively by Google. Your innovative content isn’t supposed to be lost, and effective transcribing and captioning will keep it relevant and in the eyes of your target audience.
Hopefully now, the benefits are crystal clear, and you now know what to do – start putting those captions and transcriptions on all your video content.
For any help with all your video marketing needs, feel free to speak to one of the team today.
