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4 Proven SEO Benefits to Video Transcription Your Business Needs Right Now

Illustrated image of Google search, a video player, and a transcription from Rev

RevBlogTranscription Blog4 Proven SEO Benefits to Video Transcription Your Business Needs Right Now

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.

When 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.

Overview

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.

Why Use Video Transcription?

We already know that video is important, but what’s the deal with transcripts? Well, providing a transcript for a video is going to boost engagement and reach a wider audience right off the bat. Because we consume content fast, we want to get to the point faster, but sometimes videos take time to tell a story.

Transcripts help customers follow along or quickly pull out the main points that are useful to them. It also allows for easy sharing of content. But most importantly, video transcription and closed captions should be used to provide the same value to those who are hard of hearing or in a location where it’s hard to hear (coffee shop, train, bus). That’s why transcripts are an easy way to broaden the reach of your video content — you’re connecting with users who wouldn’t normally engage with just a standalone video.

Quote from post: Transcripts are an easy way to broaden the reach of your video content.

Videos Are Great, But Search Engines Like Google Cannot Crawl Videos

While the Google AI is pretty intuitive, it doesn’t have superhuman abilities just yet. It can’t determine what an image is or even crawl the content of a video. So just like alt tags are important for images, transcripts are important for videos.

Having a transcript allows Google to crawl the content of your video and understand the subject matter. Without it, a crawler has no way to determine context and will be left to its own devices. And one thing you don’t want to do (especially if you’re working on building an SEO strategy) is leave Google to determine its own context. You always want to provide crawlers and, more importantly, your audience with as much information as possible. Fortunately, transcription provides all the information a crawler or customer could possibly need, while also benefiting your business in a number of other ways.

4 SEO Benefits to Video Transcription

There are ample benefits to SEO when it comes to transcription. SEO plays a huge role in the success of your website, and, in turn, your business. We’ll discuss 4 today, but there are plenty more reasons to transcribe audio to text. Having even a little bit of focus when it comes to transcribing video to text can help you reach weekly, monthly and yearly goals.

1. Transcription Helps Your Video Rank

Transcripts help your content rank in a number of ways. In short, they create content for Google to crawl. And when Google crawls content, it’s searching for key indicators that content is useful to searchers. By providing a video transcription, you’re including keywords in your content for Google to find and rank.

Quote from post: By providing a video transcription, you’re including keywords in your content for Google to find and rank.

Also, because crawlers need transcripts to determine intent, this extra information will provide more relevant information, and relevance is actually a large ranking factor. As the Google AI is learning, it’s trying to provide searchers with the most relevant results, so by having material that shows your content is important, it’ll help boost your rankings in the search results.

2. Transcription Increases Site Traffic

Rankings and traffic actually go hand-in-hand when it comes to SEO. If one goes up it will usually affect the other, and vice versa. So if transcriptions benefit rankings, they will also benefit your traffic. The higher up your target keywords are in Google, the closer to position one, which drives more traffic and clicks to your landing pages and content.

The reasoning is pretty simple — no one usually clicks past the first page of Google. If you don’t find what you’re looking for on the first page, you’ll simply rephrase your search query. That’s why it’s so important to rank in, at least, the top ten results for your prime keywords. A higher ranking will generate more traffic, and increased traffic drives higher rankings. It’s all intertwined.

3. Transcription Creates Link-Building Opportunities

A link-building strategy can include both internal and external links, meaning you’re linking to content within your own domain and trying to convince external sites to link back to you. Video transcripts provide benefits for both.

For internal linking, transcripts allow you to link to other relevant content on your site. For example, if your video is discussing product features, you might link to a specific product page on your site. As you build these links, you’ll start to create a web where your customer can easily navigate from one subject to the next simply by clicking through your content.

In terms of external links, a few years ago Moz conducted a study to determine what types of content consumers linked to the most. They found that content with videos, images, and lists received 70% more links than pages with just images and lists! That tells us that people WANT to share content. It just needs to be compelling and easy to share.

Transcription allows users to easily determine whether or not they want to share your video. And if your video was carefully curated and relevant to your industry, it’ll be an easy decision.

4. Transcription Lowers Bounce Rates

Because putting video transcripts on your website will increase engagement and widen your audience, it’s pretty self-explanatory why your bounce rates would shrink and the average time on page would increase. Transcription provides more content for a customer to consume. If a person hits a page with just a video and they’re unable to listen to the audio, they’re going to click away. A transcript will give an assist if a user needs to consume content in a quiet environment. And by allowing them to do so, they’ll stay longer on your site and get more value out of what you produced!

Extra Tip: Transform Transcripts Into Different Communication Mediums

As an added bonus, transcripts can also provide you with a surplus of different content opportunities. To start, your video already has a text version, and transcripts are easy to turn into blog posts. With a few tweaks and optimizations, you’ll have a piece of long-form content that will also be able to rank in the search results, further benefiting your SEO.

You may also consider breaking your transcript into snackable social media posts or create an easy to follow checklist to show how much value your business can provide. Building assets around transcription will only make your content more shareable and allow you to reach different audiences.

Wrap-up

The countless benefits of video transcripts for SEO and your customers are undeniable. This simple process of transcribing videos will not only boost the health of your site, but it will also make for a much better user experience.

Fortunately, Rev has all the transcription tools you’re going to need when it comes to creating the most accurate transcript of your audio and video. Click here to learn more about how Rev can help you!

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