Transcribing your audio and video content can improve SEO by making it appear in more search engines, helping you target more relevant keywords, creating more opportunities for internal linking, and ultimately reaching a wider audience.
In this article, we’ll explain one of the most straightforward and effective ways to improve your site’s visibility: creating transcriptions from audio and video content.
Transcribing YouTube videos, podcasts, explainer videos, and other content into text will help you hit more keywords and appear in more search results.
What Is SEO?
In short, SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving your website’s visibility (from a search engine point of view) to generate more traffic from search results.
While other search engines like Bing and Yahoo continue to receive significant traffic, about 80% of all search volume comes from Google.
With that in mind, SEO is all about optimizing your website to fit Google’s algorithm.
Here are a few of the key factors that play into Google search rankings:
Content and Relevance
High-quality content is one of the most important metrics Google looks at when determining how to rank a website.
If the content on your website is engaging, highly relevant to your offering, AND contains keywords that actual people use when searching, it would be a strong signal to Google’s crawlers on how to rank your site.
You can use keyword tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console to understand user behavior and identify common search keywords.
Search engines like Google look for a site structure their crawlers can easily read, and for each page to load quickly so the user experience is positive. A website that is too slow to load, contains distracting ads or has other issues with usability will likely not rank high in search results.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your site from another site.
Google will view your website more favorably if it has links from other popular, authoritative websites, because it sees them as votes of confidence given to your site.
Of course, this is only the tip of the SEO iceberg. Improving a site’s search visibility is a complicated process that takes time. You can’t simply make a few changes and expect your ranking to improve overnight.
How do Transcriptions Help with SEO?
Transcriptions help SEO by expanding the user experience and making your content more accessible.
Many marketers only focus on things like keyword research, backlink profiles, and site performance for SEO.
While these are obviously important, it’s easy to underestimate the impact of transcriptions.
Accessibility
The most obvious benefit of transcribing video and audio is that it makes this content available to a wider audience.
Without a transcript available, users may not be able to view your content if they’re hard of hearing or if they’re situated where they can’t turn on the sound.
User Experience
Some people may simply prefer to skim your transcript through the relevant section rather than having to skip through a video.
Your goal should be to cater to as many different users as possible.
In general, limiting your potential audience is a surefire way to hurt your search engine performance.
Voice Search
Posting a transcript also makes it easier for Google to parse your content.
With more and more people using voice search, creating transcripts of spoken content will help you match more search queries.
Internal Linking
Finally, you can add links to the text transcription just like you would overlay them on a video (except Google can’t read links embedded in video content).
This will help you direct readers to other content that may be relevant to their interests or questions.
Overall, transcribing audio and video content gives you more ways to connect with users and can make a substantial contribution to your SEO performance.
What’s the Best Transcription Process?
Now that you understand the benefits of transcription, the next step is working out a process for transcribing content.
Start by Catching Up
First, you’ll need to create new transcriptions for all existing content.
Once that’s done, you can start developing transcriptions alongside new content as you create it.
Consider this one of the steps in the content creation process — just like writing a script, recording video, and editing audio.
How do you transcribe video and audio content?
You can transcribe video and audio by:
- Manually typing out transcriptions yourself
- Google Docs voice typing
- AI-based transcription, like our own super-accurate and speedy AI Transcription Tool
- Human transcription services, like Rev, GoTranscript, HappyScribe, and others.
Naturally, each one of these comes with its own pros and cons.
For example, typing your own transcriptions is the most time-consuming option, but it also gives you the most control over accuracy.
On the other hand, most AI tools are relatively affordable and can get the job done quickly, but you’ll need to review the transcript yourself (or hire a copy editor) before publishing.
The best choice for your workflow depends on several factors including your budget, time constraints, and accuracy requirements.
We covered common transcription methods in more detail in an earlier blog post.
Do all transcriptions need to read exactly like the video?
Your transcription doesn’t need to read exactly like the video. Most transcriptions, like those transcribing YouTube videos, will clean up the text, removing filler words such as “um” or “like,” making it look more professional.
From there, you can also add keywords and phrases when they make sense in context.
It’s important to avoid “keyword stuffing” (adding keywords in awkward/irrelevant places), but you should have at least a few mentions of the main keywords in each transcript.
You may also consider adding screenshots from the video itself to break up text and make the content easier to understand.
However, it’s important to consider the medium when creating new types of content (or new versions of existing content).
For instance, court transcripts require a high degree of accuracy to serve as accurate public records. Medical transcripts will also need to be transcribed verbatim.
Final Words
No matter what kind of content you’re creating, chances are that someone else is vying for the same audience.
If you want to increase traffic and visibility, you need to take a proactive approach to SEO and leverage every opportunity to increase your ranking.
Transcribing audio and video content into text is one of the most cost- and time-efficient ways to improve your SEO and organic search results.
Did you like this article? Have any feedback or questions? Let us know in the comments.
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