Corporate organizations are utilizing video every day – from company training, to marketing campaigns. While creating accessible videos is required by law and can prevent a costly lawsuit, there are many additional benefits. One of the biggest benefits of captioning is increased search engine optimization, or SEO. When it comes to online search, the software isn’t sophisticated enough to index the audio within a video. The way around this is to provide text to accompany your video in the form of transcripts and captions, thus allowing your content to be indexed and then found by those who are searching for it.

A study with This American Life was conducted to measure the SEO benefits of adding audio transcripts to a public website of a radio program. The report looks at the results based on data from January 2012 to March 2014. During this period, the This American Life website had approximately 16 million unique visitors and 111 million page views, and there were increases in both user engagement and traffic.

The reason for this is simple – transcripts allow search engines to access the full text of your file and accurately index it. Google can’t watch your videos, but if given a transcript, it can read what information is contained within the video to understand it.