As video content keeps gaining immense popularity in recent years, the discussion about must-dos, best practices, and industry trends becomes even more dizzying. Great content alone is not enough to guarantee success for your business. Instead, you should determine whether the content is inclusive and accessible. Is the video content optimized to match the on-the-go lifestyle of your audience?
For all these requirements to be met, it requires separate tactics. Fortunately, utilizing closed captions in the video content can help to offer an effective and clever way of covering your bases. You must improve and iterate your content to make it competitive while prioritizing the needs of your audience. This article will address the benefits of using closed captions in your video content.
Closed Captions – What are They?
If you constantly deal with video content, you may have come across captions – a type of transcription of spoken words which usually appears at the bottom or top of a video. This can include speaker identification, music, sound effects, and other information. But what makes it closed?
Is there a type of key that is needed to unlock it, as its name suggests? The answer is no! Closed captions, popularly known as CC, can be toggled on and off when required. Essentially, the user has control of the captions.
On the other hand, open captions, or hard-coded or burned-in captions, are fixed to your video permanently. They are mostly preferred when the video player does not possess CC functionality.
Benefits of Using Closed Captions
- People with hearing challenges can access your content
Deaf people or people with hearing challenges are significantly limited when they watch online videos because of missing or inaccurate captions. Captioning content accurately is a small and inclusive step that certainly impacts quite a significant part of your viewer population. Creating quality and accurate content requires adherence to 4 guidelines namely:
- Accuracy
- Placement
- Completeness
- Synchronicity
- SEO indexing is improved significantly
It is a well-known fact that quality captions can help to rank your video content higher in search results. Google consists of Google bots that index pages constantly. Unfortunately, these bots cannot listen to audio or view a video. This means that plenty of content is not indexed.
Therefore, transcribing audio files to text helps Google to assign a proverbial double-tap to your videos which makes them even more searchable; thus, you will be in a position to outrank your competitors. This can be handy if you intend to be on the first page of Google. In turn, this can help to increase clicks to your website’s landing pages.
- User experience is enhanced as videos can be viewed in various environments
It is interesting to know that 80% of the people who use captions are not deaf or have any hearing challenges. therefore, if you like toggling the captions on, you are not alone. Closed captions can show soft-spoken dialogue, for instance when someone is chewing baked chips. When you use closed captions, your viewers have the flexibility to watch the video in a manner that matches their lifestyle, wherever and whenever they want.
- Non-native language speakers can comprehend your content easily
Captioned content is a critical resource for non-native language speakers to improve their language skills. When people watch video content with captions, it is a great way for them to learn about the nuanced features of the language, such as slang terms and idioms. Therefore, by providing closed captions, you’re helping millions of people to master spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, among other linguistic features.
- Closed captions can increase the average watch time
If you have ever been to a seminar or lecture, knowing that you will be expected to remember that information later, you may have realized how effective it can be when you engage multiple senses. If your audience is receiving information from all sorts of directions, they’re more likely to recall your video content if it is reinforced with the appropriate audio and text.
Final Thoughts
If efficiency and effectiveness is the objective for your video creation, then you will find closed captions to be quite handy. Online captioning can help to improve your SEO, broaden your scope of reach, offer learning materials to non-native speakers, ensure accessibility even to people with hearing problems, and make your video content more memorable and engaging. The myriads of benefits that are associated with closed captioning services cannot be understated. Therefore, click here if you’d like to receive online captioning from one of the transcribers in the market.
