Closed Caption on YouTube is Indexed in Google Search

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Eric McGehearty CEO
August 11, 2010
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    For a while now, I have been talking about using closed captioning in videos to increase your search presence. To do so on YouTube is very simple- all you need to do is type up a transcript of your video and upload it. YouTube will synchronize the video with the text. The wonderful about this this is it makes your video completely searchable.

    I decided to do an experiment and prove the case in point. I picked one of the videos we created last month, and picked a sentence out of there that I knew was not in the description or the title, so there would be no way for this video to be found. Here is the sentence I picked:

    closed caption in a video on youtube

    I put the sentence in and searched it on Google video, and found it as the top result.

    closed caption indexed by Google

    A great example of how you can improve your search engine rankings by being a better citizen on the web.

    YouTube’s official page about Captions and Subtitles

    Here is our original video on Micro Formats if you would like to take a look.

    • http://www.honeainsurance.com Mike Honea

      Thanks for that great information.

    • Mandy

      I have been trying to get this but none of my videos show up. Does this work with all your videos?

    • http://www.globerunnerseo.com Eric

      Mandy,

      How do you mean “don’t show up”? It works with all the videos, but we don’t get lots of views on all of them. The content of the video has to be good. I think this helps but is not the only think we need to do to make a winning video on YouTube.