How to Caption YouTube Videos

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Captioning your YouTube videos not only makes them more acessable for the hearing impaired, but they also make the contents of your video more accessible to YouTube.

Once YouTube knows exactly what is being said in your video you will be more likely to rank when people search for related words or phrases.

Did you know a very simple way already exists in the YouTube interface to add captions? Follow along with one of your own videos and watch your views increase.

[RenaesHomestead]

Love this. I always heard about using transcripts to rank higher and I wish I would have listened for my first 50 videos. It was the one thing that immediately made a difference on my videos ranking higher after I finally started doing it.

[huntermonk]

Hey Matt,

This is a shameless plug, but I do captioning for YouTube videos. I owe you the captioning on a few videos because I send people here to this video when they aren't really grasping how captioning can affect their SEO.

This is a lot more captivating than just hearing me talk about it. Thanks for making this! I owe you.

Thanks,
Hunter

[SureshKumarG]

I am from non english speaking countries, we don't speak english fluently like you guys do then when i check into youtube caption it's Hillarious . Thanks matt for the vidoe, i will try to include and edit it manually :)

Cheers
Suresh

[savyartist]

I greatly appreciate your videos. It has always been difficult for me to find quality videos about Youtube and video improvement in general. I was ecstatic to find yours and I have to say every video is helpful and engaging.

[vidiseo]

Hey Alfredo!
I make a point of using AE for my videos (even if they don't need it) since I'm trying to get more proficient with it.
As for the process, I usually split a video into 3 phases: Writing, Filming, and Editing. Each takes about 1-3 hours, so I find it best to spread the work over 3 days so I can juggle other tasks.

[vidiseo]

Thanks!
I was just looking for some funny phrases in my auto-captions and just started searching for a few of them to see if I would appear and thought it would be a fun way to show that YouTube factors in caption data when ranking videos.

Could be pretty powerful for beauty videos since you're probably using brand names and such. Adding some updated captions to a few of your more popular videos might give them a nice boost!

[IleaneSmith]

Fantastic video Matt! I have no idea what hilarious automatic captions I rank for. What is the best way to find out? Are you creating all your captions manually yourself or do you have an assistant? (btw Bridget doesn't count as an assistant). :)

[HelperSyndrom]

great video thanks!
here is my question, I dont have time/too lazy to do the captions myself, so is it better to activate the automatic captions or dont show them at all?

[svknyc]

Great video and thanks for encouraging more people to caption their video. One thing I would ask is to change "hearing impaired" (which is offensive to many of us) to "deaf and hard of hearing" people (which is a more proper description of us). Thanks!

[ZipGrowInc]

The actual transcript:
It's feedlot feed.
00:35
And then all of that effluent washes down into the field and they spread it
00:38
using a manure spreader
00:39
to spread that on the fields and then you have people getting sick and dying from E-Coli.
00:47
And, with these systems, that's never a problem. We don't use warm-blooded animal waste specifically.
00:51
00:54
In our system, by using fish waste, it's a cold-blooded vertebrate, you know

[KoriThompson]

I love your videos so much. I started another YouTube channel a couple months ago and I am using lots of your tips, including Trello. Thanks!

[AmeerRosic]

Such simple and effective tips. Thanks brother.

[RenaesHomestead]

Hi Ileane. Nice to see you here too! You're everywhere!

[Gremzy]

Hi, thanks for this! loving your videos and I didn't know any of this... off to look what strage captions my videos have!

[ShallieDragon]

I've had an issue with my captions lately. I uploaded a music video and then tried doing the transcript caption sync thing. However, what ended up happening was that many of the captions ended up clumping together and playing at the same time, which caused the video to crash. This also made it mind-bogglingly difficult to go back and edit them. I think the issue arose because it was a music video, and YouTube probably had trouble detecting words with all the noise going on.

[RandomLifeOfJoeC]

Hey, just came across your channel and watch I lost count...Im so gonna take some of what you have said and put it into play for my videos :)
This video is Brilliant! :D

[Craggyo]

I want to learn how to add the cool text you have in this vid...got something on that?

[vidiseo]

Hi Ileane!
After looking through some of the auto captions for my videos I just started picking out random phrases and searching them on YouTube to see if I would appear. You'll be happy to know that this video now ranks #1 for "Moaning Magneto". :D
I do all the captions myself right now which doesn't add too much extra time since I work off of a script when filming. I don't think I'd be married for very long if I made Bridget caption my videos.

[planetcorey]

Good stuff! Just did this with my music videos to see if that helps in any way. Fingers crossed!

[dmgfilms]

What screen capture software do you use? Then what software did you use to animate those screen captures?