Every business should consider implementing a global SEO strategy even if world domination is not what you are looking to achieve. If you own a business, especially in a place that receives a lot of international tourists, you could gain a lot of clients just by doing one simple step.

Add translated closed captions to your videos.

Ranking high locally is very important, but what about those in your community who are unfamiliar with English? Those who do not speak English but want to use your services from overseas? What if they are international travelers who happen to be in your area? “If you’re not translating your videos, you are missing out on reaching at least 70% of YouTube users.”

Here are some interesting facts:

• Less than 27% of Internet users speak English as their first language.
• 80% of YouTube views come from outside the US.
• 67.5% of YouTube views come from non-English speaking countries.

That’s a huge missed opportunity of potential clients that you could be helping with the excellent services you provide everyday. In fact, 69.8 million tourists visited the US in 2013 alone.

Here is what will happen when you add translated closed captions to your videos:

• Google and other search engines will index and rank your video for each closed caption translated. If you add closed captions for English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian and Swahili, your one video will be indexed and ranked 6 times.
• Your video will have less competition against your competitors who aren’t using this simple step. For example, if your competitor is only targeting people in one language compared to your video that has captions translated into several languages, your video has the potential of gaining that much more traffic to your business allowing for increased profit.
• Increase video watch time – Non-English speaking viewers are more likely to view your videos in its entirety. Because of this, your video is letting search engines know that it has extremely valuable content, which will cause search engines to increase your video’s ranking even higher.
• Non-English speakers will be that much happier with your services just because you are trying to reach out to them in their language. It shows them that you really do care about them and want to extend your offered services to them as well.

So, what languages should you add translated captions for your videos?

The answer for this all depends on where you are geographically and whom your business is targeting. Aside from the language used in your main video, I would highly recommend looking at your community and see what are the prominent languages spoken in your area and those around it. Slate has made examples of the languages most spoken for all US 50 states. But I would also check the US Census for even further information as well. Lastly, your Google Analytics will be able to tell your where your traffic is coming from which will give you a good idea of what language to use to increase your videos’ traffic and ranking.

For example, although authenticWEB is a web design company based in Orlando, we have clients all over the country. According to the Slate article above, Spanish and German are the most common languages (other than English) in Colorado, where we have several clients. Adding closed captions in those languages to our clients’ videos could greatly impact their SEO!