Importance of Video Captions and Transcriptions

World Wide Web has come a long way starting from text-based pages back in nineties to feature rich media solutions we see today. The evolution seemed necessary to not only make the websites more user-friendly and engaging, but more accessible as well. In parallel with content improvements, the need for search engine optimization is and will remain an important factor for foreseeable future because let’s face it – nobody wants their content to be hidden in second page of the search results, right?

Information is best perceived when it is offered in a couple of ways. Visual information is more acceptable and is processed by the brain much faster than plain text. Even more engagement can be achieved if video and sound are assisted by text in form of captions or transcripts. The captions are shown on top of the video synchronized to the audio. They are sometimes called subtitles and assist in understanding the speech or sounds for hearing impaired people. Transcripts are delivered alongside the video and can be seen as a whole script of the material. It highlights the text therefore acting a guide to overall understanding and brings interactivity to the viewer who can press on text to reach the certain place in video. It greatly helps learn from the material faster and is usually used by teaching sites.

SEO benefits can be easily seen since provided text is directly related to the video in turn helping search engines crawl the associated content and dramatically increasing page’s ranking. Transcriptions can be further used as separate information for printing, transferring and teaching outside the site.

As we can see, these are substantial benefits to have captions or transcripts alongside the video if accessibility, SEO and efficiency of the material are not optional. Content strategy is key to client attraction and no site should suffer a bad reputation with properly defined content.