More and more of the media consumed online is in video form or podcast. Much like the early trends away from newspapers and magazines shifting towards TV and radio, the Internet is becoming less text heavy and more focused on diverse forms of communicating. Unfortunately, most of the search engine infrastructures of the web are built around text and don’t take into account content within an audio or video file. This will leave your media largely unfound in the eyes of Google or Yahoo and consequently hard to find by potential viewers.

You can, however, have the spoken words from a video or audio file transcribed to text with Transcription Hub! Here are 5 benefits of transcribing your media:

1. Make your Media SEO-Friendly

The most obvious benefit is getting your videos and podcasts in front of more potential audience members. Just because your YouTube video has a description and a title doesn’t mean people are finding it, for example. The best way to fix that is to have the video transcribed and the text placed on the same web page as your video, which Google can “crawl” and therefore amplify your web presence.

2. Video Content Actually Boosts SEO

Google calls this “blended results,” or a combined importance when weighted against other results. Video is placed higher in search results because Google assumes that it takes more time to produce and curate than a regular text post. A site without video has a harder time competing with one with multiple videos, especially if they’re then boosted with transcripts.

3. Jump Start Additional Content

Getting a complete transcript of videos and audio can help get the training rolling on other forms of content, like blogs or lists. Linking them back to the video itself and embedding their links in the video post can help with link building and boost overall traffic.

4. YouTube’s Auto-Captions Won’t Help

The auto-captioning function on YouTube is laughably bad. Because of this, Google don’t track them for indexing and therefore it does nothing for SEO. If you upload your own captions, however, Google will recognize them as high quality and implement them into the results for your video.

5. Increase Audience Engagement

Transcripts tend to increase engagement and captions can double the rate of video completion. That means the user is engaged and having a good experience, which is important now that Google rewards videos and web pages that have longer viewing times.

If you have a collection of videos or audio files that you’d like to use online and want to boost their effectiveness, contact Transcription Hub and we’ll take care of it!