So what are they? No doubt you may have watched the odd video on YouTube and you may well have noticed a ‘CC’ button in the bottom right corner (CC = closed captions).Ĭlosed Captions are effectively subtitles – the text mirrors the timing and content of the spoken word on screen when enabled by the user. I jest of course, there’s nothing underhand about creating/using closed captions but it does take a little effort on your part to make sure you get them right first time. The captions are “closed” which means that an individual user can control whether these are shown during video playback (obviously embedded captions/subtitles play whether the user wants them to or not but that’s a whole other subject). This post however, is all about the wonders of closed captioning.Ĭlosed captioning basically means that the content of your video becomes available in a text format – something that the search engines can read and process. Optimising video on YouTube really revolves around 7 main best practises:Įvery features deserves a blog post of its own as each is equally important in helping your video content to be found amongst the 72 hours of video that are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There are two types of video content delivery but for the purpose of this article, I want to focus on YouTube, still the second largest search engine in the world. We also know that – because of all these things and more – video marketing is fast becoming as competitive and technically challenging as other forms of optimisation so it pays to know what works and what doesn’t. Video – what marketer doesn’t love it eh? Done well, we know it’s fantastic for driving traffic, lowering bounce rate and making content more ‘sticky’, increasing engagement (and hopefully conversions), and generally enhancing the whole user experience.

Youtube turn off closed captioning