Why Closed Captioning? Improve Your SEO

Closed Captioning, Subtititles, and Transcripts provide text that search engines can index resulting in better Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Businesses or individuals with a lot of video content desire traffic to their content to improve visibility and monetization strategies. Videos with captions will help drive traffic to your content because not only will the title and description be indexed but also the captions and transcripts meaning users are more likely to find your video over one a similar one that is not captioned. I am not an expert on the backend of how this works, so if this speaks to your why behind starting or continuing a captioning practice, there are lots of articles and tutorials online that provide a more in-depth explanation of how this works.

Searching for Captioned Content

Improving my SEO is not a big captioning motivating factor for me but I am always on the look-out for good quality, captioned content. This can be done easily with a few tricks. You can take control of your video searches on Google and YouTube by filtering your results to show only captioned content.

How to find closed captioned video content on Google.

Type in your desired search term. (Go Huskies!)
Choose Videos
Choose Search Tools
Change All videos to Closed captioned

Videos > Search Tools > All videos > Closed Captioned

How to find closed captioned video content on YouTube.

1. Visit www.youtube.com. Type in your desired search term(s).

2. Click Enter or Search

3. Choose Filter > Subtitles/CC

Even Easier way to search for Captioned Content on YouTube.

1. Type in your Search Term followed by a comma and cc with no spaces. Your results will automatically return closed captioned results without the extra keystrokes.

huskies,cc in search box to filter CC content

Bonus for Chrome Users: This feature works directly from the omnibox! You can search YouTube by typing youtube in the search box, then pressing tab, then typing search term(s),cc, then enter and you will be automatically taken to YouTube with your results filtered for closed captioned videos.

Sadly, this search delimiter doesn't work in Google search engine so the drop-down filter menus will have to do.

>>> Create Accessibility