How Subtitles can Help Improve Your SEO Strategy
Videos are the most popular tool to reach an audience – taking up 82% of all data online as of 2025. With so many videos being created and shared – naturally, the competition rises. And this is why the ranking of videos matters. Whether it’s promotional, educational, informative, or entertaining videos – ranking and visibility are important factors in unlocking the key to online success.
The SEO ranking is first of all based on keywords, and if you want a bigger audience it’s definitely worth understanding the basics behind video SEO and keywords. Subtitles can help obtain a much better keywords profile as well as have a positive effect on engagement metrics that likewise is an important game player in SEO strategy and succeeding online.
Contents
In this article, we will explain the meaning of video SEO and keywords, unveil how to automate the process of subtitling with an AI-powered auto subtitle generator, and enrich you with a few bonus tips on how to improve your SEO strategy.
Video SEO
SEO is short for search engine optimization and is the process of so-called search engine robots ‘crawling’ webpages all over the internet and detecting what every page is about. They do this by indexing specific factors that they can use to decide the ranking of each page in specific search inquiries. The frequency of them crawling a website depends on factors such as how often the website is being updated, and they prioritize newly updated content, so it’s also good to create content regularly. In other words, SEO is the process of improving website traffic.
When it comes to the ranking of websites we have a few important game players; some of the most important ones being keywords and engagement metrics. Keywords increase your chances of better ranking and thereby visibility. Good engagement metrics, such as views, watch duration, likes, comments, and shares show robots that your content is interesting and because of that, it will also be ranked better.
But did you know that the actual content of your videos is not detectable to search engine robots? They cannot index and understand the visual and audible parts of videos, and therefore it is not equally accounted for when the ranking is carried out. However, you can get around this by adding some indexable measures to your videos that enable the search engine robots to understand what your content is about and in which search inquiries they should place your content. This can be keywords within your title, tags, subtitles, and video description.
For example, if you are making cooking videos with recipes, first of all, you want to include words like cooking, recipes, etc. and secondly specify what kind of cooking you are doing, like Seafood, Traditional, Seasonal, Vegetarian, Low-carb, etc. and also the exact kind of food in each specific video, like chili con carne, Protein rich salad, salmon pie, cheesecake, etc. – in order for the robots to match your content to the right search inquiries.
Closed Caption Subtitles
However, not just any kind of subtitles will directly influence your SEO strategy. It particularly has to be subtitle files, such as SRT or VTT files, added to your videos in order for the robots to find and use those all-important keywords within them. They are called closed caption subtitles because they can be turned on and off. Another benefit of such subtitles is that you can add a selection of translated subtitles for your audience to choose from, which enables you to potentially reach a bigger audience.
You see these kinds of subtitles on for example BBC iplayer or on Netflix, and also as an option on many YouTube videos
Hardcoded subtitles, on the other hand, can’t be turned on and off. They are always on the screen and therefore referred to as open caption subtitles. Although robots can’t detect them they can have an indirect positive effect on the ranking since subtitles in themselves improve engagement metrics by up to 80% as a result of causing better comprehension of, attention to, and memory of videos.
The online subtitle translator feature has become invaluable for content creators and viewers. For content creators, it offers a way to reach a broader audience and improve the accessibility of their videos. By adding subtitles to videos, creators can ensure their content is accessible to hearing-impaired viewers or speak different languages.
For viewers, subtitles can significantly enhance the viewing experience, allowing them to understand better and engage with the content. Whether it’s a movie, a tutorial, or any other type of video, subtitles can make the content more enjoyable and easier to follow along with.
How To Add Subtitles Automatically?
Subtitling videos is no longer a manual and overly time-consuming task. Since the world of artificial intelligence (AI) started to evolve, many new opportunities within advanced computer technology have been developed – including transcribing speech to text. This way software can auto-generate subtitles for you in a matter of minutes depending on the length of your video. The accuracy of transcribing speech to text is surprisingly good, in fact up to 98% when audio quality is good.
With most software the process of subtitling videos goes like this:
- Upload your video to the software
- Let the software auto-generate subtitles for your video
- Edit or translate the subtitles if needed.
- Save the whole video with hardcoded subtitles, or download the subtitles separately as SRT or VTT to upload as closed caption subtitles.
Tips On How To Increase Video Seo
#Improve Your Video Content
Obviously, improving video content is one of the most important steps in increasing video SEO and overall video performance. To improve your marketing strategy, make an interesting thumbnail, and a catchy intro, and keep an engaging storyline throughout the video. Maybe indicate that something more is coming towards the end to keep viewers hungry. Give your all, but don’t give it all away immediately.
# Understand Your Video’s Effect on its Viewers
A video needs to cause an emotional effect on viewers in order to succeed. Maybe it excites them, makes them laugh, amazes them, or even annoys them – it can be a mix of different effects. It’s just important that the effect is strong enough to make viewers want to like, comment or even share the video. This will affect engagement metrics, robots will notice, and they will rank your video higher and make it appear more often in people’s news feeds.
# Recycle Your Subtitles
Download your subtitles as SRT, VTT, or TXT files to use for video description, for a blog, or something else. This way you increase your amount of content without having to make everything from scratch every time.
# Add Keywords when no one is Speaking
If you are using closed caption subtitles you can try to add a few keywords when no one is speaking. This way you increase your keyword profile which is good for SEO.
# Make sure Your Keywords and Video content Correspond Well
This way chances are better that your content answers viewers’ requests and you’ll get lower bouncing rates and better engagement metrics.
# Consider Your Keywords
Consider using keywords that are not the most competitive ones. Although it’s fine to also include the most competitive keywords, try to also choose some with fewer searches, like for instance a sequence of more words together. This can help you achieve higher rankings as well.