How to Add Closed Captions and Subtitles to Your YouTube Videos to Get More Views

When it comes to optimizing your YouTube videos, one of the most overlooked but important steps is adding captions. Believe it or not, this step can make a big difference in how many views you get and help you reach a wider audience. 

Want to add captions and/or subtitles to your YouTube videos but not sure where to begin? Keep reading for our step-by-step guide, below! 

Toosa Tip: Adding captions makes your YouTube videos fully searchable via Toosa’s exclusive Social Search Engine. Your audience can search for any word or phrase you’ve ever said, and then get taken right to the moment in each video where you said it.  

What Are Closed Captions, Open Captions, and Subtitles?

First things first, let’s make sure we all know what we’re talking about here:

Captions are lines of time-synchronized text that appear at the bottom of your videos. They write out the words spoken (and sometimes describe sound effects) during the video in time with the audio. They are intended for viewers who cannot hear the audio track or who want to follow along with the audio by reading captions while watching. 

Closed Captions are embedded within a video file but can be toggled on or off depending on the viewer’s preference through the video player (e.g., YouTube). Open Captions are captions that are always present during the video (i.e., can’t be turned off).  

Subtitles are intended for viewers who speak other languages — they are translations of your video’s content into another language. Like closed captions, subtitles are typically embedded in a video file and toggled on or off by the video player.

What Are the Benefits of Adding Captions and/or Subtitles?

It may have never occurred to you before that you should add captions to your YouTube videos. Or maybe you thought about it, but then thought, “Why bother? What’s in it for me?” 

It turns out there’s a lot in it for you! Here are a few reasons why adding quality captions will improve your YouTube videos’ performance: 

• Captions will make your videos watchable without sound. This means people in public places without headphones can still watch your videos. This will boost your audience retention rates and increase your overall views. 
• Captions make your videos accessible to the hearing impaired. Accessibility is important! This is why closed captioning is required by law in the United States for television shows, for example. 
• Captions help your videos rank higher in search engine results, including Google and YouTube’s internal search. They are one of the best kept SEO secrets, in fact. 
• Captions make your videos more likely to be recommended in YouTube’s Recommended Videos feed. You’ll attract new audience members! 
• Captions can make your videos fully searchable (through a tool like Toosa’s Social Search Engine). That means your viewers can easily find and watch even more of your content, including older videos they may not know about. 
• Subtitles can increase your international viewership by making your video content accessible in multiple languages. According to YouTube, on average, two-thirds of a channel’s views come from outside the creator’s home country. Make sure those viewers can get the most out of your videos!

Adding captions creates a better overall viewing experience and can help increase your videos’ reach.

While it can take some effort to add accurate captions (and especially subtitles), these benefits make it all worth it, right? Keep reading to find out how to get started!

How Do You Add Captions to Your YouTube Videos?

YouTube has built in several options for adding closed captions and subtitles to your videos that your viewers can choose to turn off or on when they watch your video. It’s easy to get started. You can add them during the upload process or afterwards. 

To Add Captions When Uploading Your Video

1. After uploading your video to YouTube and entering the video’s details, click on Next to get to the Video elements screen.  
2. On the right-hand side, click on ADD. 

You’ll see a few options here:

First up is Upload. This is what you’ll choose if you already have a caption file or transcript file created (such as if you’ve used a third-party service (see below) or written your own. 

Next is the Auto-Sync tool. This gives you a box where you can type in your transcript while the video is playing (and you can pause it as many times as you need to). Don’t worry about the timing of the captions at all. YouTube will take care of inserting your captions by automatically syncing the transcript text you entered with the video at the right time. After you’ve finished typing in the transcript, click on DONE. YouTube will begin automatically assigning the timings at that point. (Expect the assign timing process to take several minutes or more, depending on your video length and complexity. YouTube’s auto-sync tool works via its speech recognition technology. YouTube notes that the tool isn’t recommended for videos over 1 hour long or videos with poor audio quality.)

The third option is Type Manually. You’ll be able to type in each caption individually and assign it a time (either by typing in the start/stop minutes or by using the slider tool.) Click on the + CAPTION link at the top left of this window to add a new caption. 

To Add Captions or Subtitles in Other Language After Your Video Is Uploaded

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
2. From the left menu, select Subtitles.
3. Select the video you want to add captions to, and then click on EDIT (if your video already has captions that you want to edit, including automatic captions — see below) or ADD LANGUAGE to add subtitles in another language.  Click on ADD in the Add column to get started and then follow the steps above. 

What About YouTube’s Automatic Captions?

These days, YouTube uses its speech recognition technology to add captions to your videos automatically in multiple languages. (This currently works for standard on-demand aka pre-recorded and uploaded videos — but YouTube is in the process of rolling out automatic live captions for livestream videos in English too.) These automatic captions will be added every time you upload a video (although it can take a good while for the captions to appear due to processing times.)

This is the minimal effort option, but you will sacrifice some quality here. YouTube’s speech recognition technology is never going to perfect. Although YouTube’s always improving its machine learning algorithms, dialect, background noise, pronunciation, accents, and video quality issues can all introduce errors. The quality can really vary.  

Luckily, you can fix any automatic caption errors (either in the text or in the timing) with a few steps. 

To Edit Your Automatic Captions

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
2. From the left menu, select Subtitles.
3. Click the video with the captions that need fixing.
4. Under Subtitles, click More and then Edit. 
5. Click on DUPLICATE AND EDIT  and then CONTINUE to start editing the automatic caption draft.
6. In the editing panel that appears, click inside any line in the caption track panel to edit and correct the text.
7. To adjust the timing, you can click and drag the caption in the timeline window, or click on the EDIT TIMINGS button to type in exact times, or use the up or down arrow buttons on your keyboard to adjust the timing of each caption line. 
8. Click on Publish when you’re finished.

(Note: YouTube also gives you the option to download the caption file, edit it on your own computer in a plain text editor, and then reupload it.)

Also important to know:  YouTube has auto-translate features to translate your captions automatically into other languages — but this only works if you add and publish your own captions (rather than relying solely on the automatic captions.)

A Few Additional Tips for Adding Captions and/or Subtitles

Can’t it be any easier? Does all this sound too complicated or frustrating? You can always outsource the task to get high-quality captions or subtitles for a fee. A few companies that offer this service include 3PlayMedia,  Amara, Automatic Sync Technologies, cielo24, and many others.  If you go this route, you’ll likely get a closed caption file that you can then upload and add to your video, or else you will grant the third-party access to your channel to add them. 

Is anyone even using my captions or subtitles? You can find out how many people turned on captions and/or subtitles for your videos under your YouTube Analytics. Go to the BUILD AN AUDIENCE tab and then scroll down to the bottom of the page. You’ll see how many viewers turned them on and in which languages. This can give you valuable information about who’s watching your videos and whether you might want to improve your captions/subtitles in certain languages! 

Want to learn more about subtitles? YouTube offers a great free Master Class on adding captions to reach wider international audiences through its translation tools — check it out!

TL;DR:

Closed captions and subtitles are key to improving your YouTube viewers’ experience and reaching a wider audience. YouTube has built in several options for adding closed captions and subtitles in multiple languages to your videos, including uploading your own file, typing in the transcript for YouTube to auto-sync with your video’s timing, and even an automatic caption option. You can also always seek help from a third-party as well for a fee. 

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