Video transcription doesn’t need to be daunting. In fact, with Rev’s simple process, you can use transcription to boost your website’s SEO and maintain strong Google Search rankings. And that’s just the beginning! From link building to lower bounce rates, we’ll walk through how video transcription can help you build out SEO best practices.
hen you start to optimize for search, you’ll begin to see benefits across the board. After all, increased traffic should create more leads and more leads will generate more sales, which drives revenue. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned expert in search marketing, transcribing videos is one strategy where you should dig in your heels and implement.
Make Your Content More Accessible
Having a transcript available creates a better user experience for a potentially large portion of your audience.
Transcripts make your content much more appealing to
- Those who are hard of hearing
- People who speak other languages than yours as their first language
- Those who don’t like listening to podcasts or watching videos for whatever reason and prefer to read
- Scanners or simply busy people who might scroll through your transcript while listening to you to find a place they want to skip to
- Employees or commuters who don’t have their headphones plugged in and aren’t in an environment where they can blast out the sound
2. Improve Your SEO
The web is constantly crawled by bots that read and catalogue content so that it can show relevant content to searchers.
While they’re getting better at cataloguing the spoken word, it’s still far easier for these algorithms to read and index the written word than the spoken. They can’t scan audio or video very well, even now.
If you have a transcript below your podcast, perhaps under your show notes, it allows Google and other search engines to know everything you were talking about during the episode and helps them to index you properly for future search engine results.
3. Make It Easier to Refer Back to Your Content
Listeners don’t always have the time to listen to a whole podcast episode when they come across it.
With transcripts, it becomes much easier for listeners to come back and find the content they want or to skip to the point in the episode that they care about the most.
Google’s algorithm has hundreds (if not thousands) of ranking factors that determine your rightful place in the search results. Because of this, it can seem difficult to stay on top of things when trying to build an SEO strategy.
But here’s a hint: start where your audience lives. And regardless of what niche you’re in or what you’re selling, your audience is consuming content through video. That’s why transcripts for videos are important to search marketing.
The 4 Big SEO Benefits of Video Transcription Are:
1. Higher search rankings
2. Increased traffic
3. Link building opportunities
4. More time spent watching, and lower bounce rates
Video Content is Here to Stay
With that said, let’s discuss why transcripts are so important in the first place. Like we talked about above, your customers are watching videos, whether you want them to or not. The average person watches more than an hour and a half of online video content per day, so if you’re not using video as part of your strategy, you should start. In fact, 81% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool because it’s necessary in this day and age.
As consumers, we crave interaction with our content. Whether it’s audio or video, we want something that’s engaging. And that’s because we’re constantly bombarded with advertisements and all forms of marketing, no matter where we are (Internet or not). We now have to pick and choose wisely when we decide to interact with a brand. That’s why you have to have content that’s going to stand out and provide value to your customers, and that value can be found in video.
4. Increase Engagement
Who would have thought that captions would lead to increased video engagement and double the rate of video completion? By enhancing videos, audio to text transcription allows viewers to get a better experience from a video which helps to increase their overall engagement and experience. With that comes longer viewing times and more interaction with your brand. All of this is very important as Google rewards those videos and websites that have longer viewing times by increasing their page ranking.
Plus, audio to text transcriptions allow for easy creation of additional content by allowing content producers to scan the clips for specific words, phrases, and topics that can become the basis of other pieces of content.
Whether you’re a YouTuber, a Podcaster, a radio show producer, a blogger, writer, PhD candidate, book author, Spellcaster, Bladerunner, or bodysnatcher. Or you simply have a website that writes about tech or popular culture, you need online transcription services more than you think. Radio shows and other forms of broadcasting have gone online. Exclusively in some cases. It’s 2016, internet gains a massive foothold in mainstream mass media every single day. YouTuber is self-explanatory, unless you live under a rock with mobile data. If that is the case, I don’t even know how you’re reading this. Anyway, one of the terms “Podcaster” simply means one who produces podcasts. Podcasts are basically weekly or bi-weekly radio shows which you can download on your device and listen to whenever you feel like.
That is the universal podcast symbol, yes, even on Mars. That’s literally a bald dude with two halos. Or his head is like a Wi-Fi router. Anyway, everyone loves to get their information on-the-go, which is where podcasts have been so successful. There are plenty of podcasts available online, talking daily, weekly or monthly about a number of different topics, whether it be technology, politics, finance, sports, movies, music, video games, dandruff, Chewbacca, Donald Trump etc.
But sometimes there can be accessibility issues for listeners. For example, if someone has slow internet access, or are just too cheap to get better internet, they can face problems with streaming or downloading those shows. Especially videos that are more often larger files.
How can online audio transcription help?
Even if you’re on a dial-up modem with 128 kbps speed, opening a transcript literally takes seconds. (Kids, if you don’t know what a dial-up modem is, you don’t wanna know the pain.) Anyway, by getting your shows transcribed, you provide your listeners the following benefits:
- Up-to-date digital, readable record of your shows.
- Help people with hearing disability.
- Help people who want to read your shows while listening to Dr. Dre on their “Beats” headphones.
- Ensure wider consumption of content you’re producing.
- More people = more popularity of your show
Audio transcription isn’t just a service reserved for big companies and legal offices. Nowadays sees the need for young adults to be more efficient with their time in order to be able to create a good work life balance, get the most from their studies and gain a competitive edge over fellow colleagues or students.
Audio transcription is a great way to get ahead and offers young students, influencers, budding journalists and researchers the opportunity to focus on things that really matter whilst the laborious task of writing up notes or audio files is done for them!
Social Media
Being an influencer nowadays is seen as a career and something that a lot of young people take seriously either as their main focus or alongside another job or studying.
If you have the need for audio files, then it is well worth transcribing them over to text as audio files aren’t compatible with social media snippets. However, text and images are so transcribing will help influencers to get more social shares, resulting in more traffic.
For those that make videos – Research has shown that around 85% of videos on Facebook are watched with the sound turned off. Assuming that this behaviour is likely mirrored across other social media platforms, having accurate transcripts to caption videos is a great way to increase engagement with your content.
Audio transcribing for your Instagram, Facebook or YouTube videos can;
- Drastically improve your appearance in search results as your entire dialogue is turned into fully searchable text, rather than just a few chosen keywords
- Greatly expands audience and increases views
- Allows those hard of hearing to watch
- Saves time typing up captions or subtitles yourself
So whether you’re an up and coming corporate star, a rising influencer or studying for your dream career – audio to text transcription is a great way to make your life easier without you needing to work harder.
