Video transcription and subtitles shouldn’t be alien to any business or organization. The need to meet accessibility standards is crucial, but there’s another major benefit to adding written transcriptions of your company’s marketing, informational, and educational video materials.

In the digital marketing world, Google is king. Ensuring your future customers and clients can find your company using the search engine giant is the number one most important factor with a bullet. Google, however, isn’t as sophisticated as many people give it credit. Since the famed Pagerank algorithm was introduced, it’s focused mainly on the written word and number of references (citations in the education world; links in the digital one) in order to ensure its users find the best result for their search query.

As the Internet evolved and connection speeds increased, video platforms like YouTube (now owned by Google) began to take off, but search engines have been slow to adapt their ranking technologies to identify video content and position their results according to the same philosophy as text. While that’s certainly changing, companies can get a leg up on these limitations and add verbatim text content to their existing and upcoming videos and better position themselves in search engine results, therefore attracting more qualified customers to their websites.

Especially challenging if you have a wealth of existing video content or an aggressive content marketing initiative, properly transcribing and adding subtitles to your videos can be a time-consuming, costly task for an in-house employee. Several third-party transcription companies exist and can cater to large-scale tasks such as these, and while they often offer the same services, no two providers are alike. Here’s what to look for when researching a transcription company and how each service can benefit your organization.

Video Transcription Services

Video transcriptions of the dialogue included in your video are crucial to helping your content reach a wider, more relevant audience. Luckily, transcriptions of videos are often more cost-effective than subtitles or closed captioning services, offering a healthy alternative for those companies looking to increase their online presence without breaking the bank.

By utilizing video transcription services and adding written text content to your videos, your content will be more effectively interpreted and categorized by Google and other search engines, therefore helping your customers and clients to find and reference.

Longer duration video content should absolutely be transcribed in order to best present your content to the world. Especially important for long-form presentations, lectures, product demonstrations, keynotes, and video podcasts, allowing a written transcription allows users to skip to the relevant point of the video and access what they need quickly and efficiently.

Audio Transcription Services

Any podcasts, interviews, or recorded audio that goes up on your company’s website should be accompanied by a verbatim transcription of what was said, who said it, and how it fits into the topic you’re discussing. Internal recordings and meeting minutes can (and should) be transcribed, but there’s obviously no benefit to your digital marketing on that front.

Subtitle and Closed Captioning Services

Adding subtitles to your video content is the best way to add text-based, easily searchable content is the best way to improve the performance of your video materials. Subtitles include all dialogue in text - content that would otherwise be invisible to Google’s ranking algorithm.

Luckily, once you have these subtitle files, they can be easily uploaded to most video sharing platforms, including YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and more. Ask your transcription provider to send your subtitle files in a WebVTT or Simple SRT format and you’ll be off to the races.

Another strategy to consider is adding closed captions to your video content. Closed captioning includes any non-verbal sounds to help deaf and hearing impaired users read what’s happening within the audio track of your videos. However, there’s another benefit to your digital marketing efforts in adding closed captioning rather than subtitles.

Closed captioning includes additional written context to your videos such as facts, names, places, topics, and more. By adding these short summaries, search engines can gain a better understanding of who’s saying what, where the video is taking place, and ultimately, what the video is about. This only helps your efforts to improve your company’s visibility online and drive more customers to your products and services.

Foreign Subtitling and Translation Services

Especially important for companies working in multiple geographic regions, adding transcriptions and subtitles in multiple languages and dialects will boost your message to additional markets and improve your digital marketing efforts.

While Google and other companies provide automated translation services, this has been shown to be far less effective than investing in foreign subtitling and transcriptions. Your chosen keywords may be automatically displayed within the written text, but automation software is incredibly poor at grammar, syntax, and punctuation, which can harm your ability to appear in quality search results.

By translating your video content to foreign languages and adding these subtitles to your YouTube content, website, and other video sharing platforms, you’ll also have a leg up on your competition in the digital realm.

Summary Information and Video Description Services

A crucial element of appearing in YouTube related videos and recommendation sections, providing your customers and clients with a detailed description of the video below to help them better understand what’s being said within. Furthermore, adding a link to related content on your website will help guide them on their path should their interest be piqued.

Format Conversion Services

While you’re using transcription and subtitling services to boost your online presence and improve your digital marketing efforts, it’s worth investing in a decent copywriter to take that written content and spin it off into other marketing formats. Search engines tend to value variety and diversity in content, so altering those transcribed materials to ensure they gain the maximum reach possible should be a top priority. Some examples include:

- Infographics
- PDFs
- Flyers
- Brochures and leaflets
- PowerPoint and visual demonstrations

No matter how sophisticated your marketing strategy or impactful your video content may be, they won’t help you go the extra mile to appearing in more search results. With a committed third-party transcription provider, your company’s digital marketing efforts will go above and beyond what you’ve grown accustomed to.

For a low-cost, high-quality transcription service, check out Transcription Hub. We’ve got the service and experience needed to transcribe your video materials and help you boost your digital marketing efforts. Starting at just $0.75 per minute, there’s no better option in the professional transcription world - contact us today.