You think you’ve done all the work. You created a Lakeland video production. You optimized it for the web. You used well-researched keywords. You shared it on social media and online communities. And yet, somehow, those are still not enough. Your website isn’t ranking well. You are falling behind your digital marketing goals. You are not reaching the right audience. Your bounce rate remains the same.
What could be the reason for this? You’ve done everything that there is to do, right? Not exactly. What you didn’t mention is that your videos have subtitles. Do they have them? If not, that is the reason why your website isn’t ranking as well as it should.
Some People Can’t Hear Your Audio
There are two reasons for this. One, there are over 28 million American adults who are either deaf or hard of hearing. You cannot isolate this huge population. Two, many people can’t or don’t want to turn on the audio of the videos they watch. Do you know that more than 85% of Facebook videos are watched on mute? This means that if you don’t have captions or subtitles embedded in the video, you will lose that large audience. On Snapchat, only two-thirds of videos are watched with the audio on.
Subtitles Can Improve Comprehension
People understand the videos better when there are subtitles or captions. Even people who are native speakers of the language you used in the video will still want to turn on the caption or subtitle option. People prefer watching videos with subtitles on. Or at the very least, they want that option to be available for them.
Not All People Speak the Language of the Video
If you are promoting a product or service that is for everyone, don’t you want the ability to reach out to all kinds of audiences? Unfortunately, if your Lakeland video production doesn’t have a caption or subtitle, you will fail to get through many groups of people. Around the world, English is only spoken by 26% of the population. About 20% are Chinese-speaking, 9% Spanish, 5% Arabic, and the rest of the language 42%.
Subtitles Improve SEO
Is there a better reason to put a caption on your videos than improved SEO? When people click on your video’s link and spend time watching it, that will send a signal to Google. The algorithm demands that videos receive clicks and view times. This will have a positive effect on your search engine ranking. Sharing these videos on social media will also improve your rank.