Video SEO 101: why video needs transcription

Creating video content can have some serious benefits for your website. The potential benefits from adding metadata, tags and allowing your video to be shared across social media are widespread. One way that can help you climb SERPs and get you on Google's front page is the inclusion of transcripts.
August 2, 2018

 

From adding value to showcasing your work to fresh audiences, creating video content can have some serious benefits for your website. But if the content isn't properly optimized for SEO, then you'll be missing out on a huge advantage. The potential benefits from adding metadata and tags, as well as allowing your video to be shared across social media, are widespread, but one way in particular that can help you climb the SERPs and get you on that all important Google front page is through the simple inclusion of transcripts.

 How do video transcripts help with SEO?

1. Transcripts lure in Google and other search engines with relevant keywords

By showing search engines what they want to see, transcripts increase the chances of your page showing up in search results. 

2. Link building can't happen without text. Video has no text. Transcripts do.

If there's no text to attach links, there's nowhere to include backlinks - and backlinks are one of the pillars of SEO strategy.

3. Content in a flash: transcripts can double as blogs & articles

Reduce the amount of content you have to produce by quickly repurposing transcripts into blogs and articles

4. Automated transcription will convert your video to text in moments

We'll spare you the technical details: you upload a video file and automated transcription gives you back the text transcript.

 

Why transcripts?

A crowd of people watching a film

These days, adding transcripts to your videos is essential ' even beyond the realms of SEO. That's not just bias from us: including transcripts of video opens your content up to a wider range of viewers that may not be able to listen to your videos, whether that's because of disability, or for audiences whose native language isn't English. Transcription also brings the potential for captioning, which allows your content to be viewable for people watching in places where they can't turn the sound on ' like on the morning commute or passing time in doctors waiting rooms.

But beyond these general benefits of video content production and transcriptions, why is it that transcription and SEO go hand-in-hand?

Keywords

A vital way for Google to rank your website is through the addition of keywords ' and what better way to add keywords to your videos than with transcription? By virtue of transcripts being written and often long-form, they tend to contain a wealth of keywords that are picked up in more long-form search queries. In fact, pages that contain more than 2,000 words are more likely to appear in the top ten search results on Google, so transcriptions from slightly longer videos stand a great chance of getting you noticed. So while a visitor may be in a position to watch and listen to your content without the need to see your transcript, it'll actually be the keywords copied from the audio that enables them to find your page in the first place.

Looking for keywords in videos is made easier with a video transcript

You can also rely on video transcripts to help mold your SEO strategies. Imagine your landing page utilizes the keyword "website design business," but you've noticed higher traffic toward pages that have transcripts featuring the words "web design agency." In this scenario, you can change things up to see if the higher figures translate elsewhere.

Here's an example of a video we built at Trint, hosted in the Trint Player. By posting this video on its own dedicated page, all the words in the transcript can be found by Google, increasing SEO; not only that, but they also make the video easier to watch without sound, increasing accessibility.

 

Building links

There's also excellent link building potential when adding transcripts to your video. By exporting the dialogue as text and posting it on to your page, you integrate references for different parts of the video, whether just points being made or actual quotations. This not only provides your audience with a better understanding of what you're trying to say, but it also adds some all-important relevant links across your site and beyond. Your dialogue becomes much more quotable to other websites, paving the way for more relevant backlinks.

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The power of transcription

Transcription can be very impactful for websites. David Schneider, writing for SearchEnginePeople, noted that the radio show This American Life puts 6.68% of their search engine traffic down to their transcripts ' a healthy audience return for transcribing existing content. He also explains how YouTube videos that add captions can also expect to see around a 7.32% increase in views.

It's also worth mentioning that adding an accompanying transcript to your video can help to turn embedded content into a standalone blog-style post in its own right ' which can help SEO. And by offering information in written form, it encourages fewer bouncebacks from visitors who aren't interested or able to watch a clip at that specific moment in time. This, again, helps SEO.

The ease of transcribing?

Transcripts save time while editing video

The process of transcribing videos used to be a difficult one, but with recent advancements in AI, it's become far easier. This is especially true with Trint's AI-fuelled speech recognition technology that aims to get the job done in a fraction of the time that it takes to manually transcribe. In fact, a typical 45-minute video interview takes under 45 minutes to be transferred into writing.

The best video files for transcription are .MP4, .WMA, .MOV and .AVI, and thanks to websites that are able to convert files into these formats, it's simple to get the right file even if it's not already one of the types listed.

To begin the conversion process, all you need to do is upload the file you want to be transcribed to Trint. When the file has finished being scoured for dialogue, you'll be presented with a timestamped transcript in Trint's dedicated editor that's linked to the original video file so you can verify text that looks like it doesn't match up to what was said.

Given that electronic transcriptions are a relatively new technology that depends on factors like low background noise, little overtalk and clearer voices ' things that sometimes can't be controlled ' there's always a chance that inaccuracies will occur. This is why having a good editor on-hand to help you review your transcription is essential. Optimizing your video for SEO isn't much use if one of your key points hasn't translated to text correctly!

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There are plenty of opportunities to go further with your video content through Trint, too, especially through the use of adding captions to your video ' a great way to keep people watching even though their device is muted. And with Trint's video caption extension for Adobe' Premiere' Pro CC software, there's now added convenience to the transcribing process.

Where manually transcribing video content used to be seen as a lot of hassle with little reward, the rise of SEO has made transcripts a necessity. Luckily there are automatic transcription services on-hand to take the fuss out of the process ' and just in time to help you rise through the SERPs.

We're confident Trint is the best option for transcribing video content. To find out how Trint can optimize the way you produce video, click here:

 

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