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6 Reasons You Need To Have Your Site’s Videos Transcribed

multimediaProviding transcripts of the videos on your personal or business website is one of the best ways to boost traffic and increase your visibility online. Video transcripts provide added points of access for visitors to your site and allows you to promote your materials more effectively across a wider range of potential customers. Transcripts can create a more interactive experience and offer a number of benefits for your online presence.

  1. Search engine visibility. Even with the advanced algorithms currently employed by Google and other search engines, online video content typically cannot be indexed in its original form. As a result, some of the most valuable and informative content on your site may be overlooked in search engine results, lowering your visibility and robbing you of potential customers or views. Recent changes in Google’s ranking system reward highly informative sites and penalize content farms. By providing transcripts for your online video content, you can secure higher rankings and ensure your site gets full credit for all the information it provides to consumers.
  2. Catering to the customer. Video content can attract additional views to your website; however, some potential customers may prefer the written word over video content. By offering an alternative for these guests to the site, you can enhance your online reputation and provide superior customer service even for first-time visitors to the website. Video transcription is one more way you can cater to your customers and their individual needs.
  3. Broadening your horizons. Especially for website developers with an eye on the international marketplace, offering a professional video transcript can help get the message across more clearly and effectively. Potential customers in foreign countries may not understand the video content on your site; transcripts of the material can often offer additional avenues for understanding.
  4. Access on the go. Mobile phone technology allows consumers to access information more rapidly and with greater flexibility. Video content can often take up too many valuable bytes of internet access and may not display correctly on some operating systems; by providing video transcripts as well as pure video material, you can better serve customers who access your site through mobile phones and devices.
  5. Be the buzz. The text included in video transcript materials can be cut and pasted or quoted in online social networking sites and blogs, thus expanding your potential online audience. By offering cutting-edge videos and supplementing them with transcripts, you can double your chances of linkbacks from popular online sites.
  6. Overcoming barriers. Making your website and online materials accessible to the widest possible audience is essential for success. Your potential customers include individuals facing special challenges including deafness and hearing impairment; by offering them access to the material in an alternate way, you can build good will in the online community.

Offering video transcripts as an alternative or supplement to existing video materials can help you get the most out of your website. Transcripts can spur higher search engine rankings and more traffic while providing your potential customers with the best possible online experience.

2 Comments to 6 Reasons You Need To Have Your Site’s Videos Transcribed

  1. Dana Tan's Gravatar Dana Tan
    August 20, 2012 at 2:39 pm | Permalink

    We are in the process of transcribing all of our videos. Can you give us a recommendation of how best to post the transcript file on our product pages? Would it be best to post a link to the transcript file or insert the iframe transcript file from DotSub.com (in that case wouldn’t DotSub.com be getting credit for our original content?) or just add it to the YouTube video content and have it stream from there (which is what’s happening right now)? Will Google still crawl the transcript if the only place it’s available is on YouTube? If so, doesn’t YouTube get credited for that content, and not our site? Thanks! Your post is spot on. We are just trying to figure out how to do this the best way possible.


    • August 20, 2012 at 9:29 pm | Permalink

      @Dana: Great question! We recommend posting the transcript directly on the same page as where you’ll be displaying your video (i.e. if you’re going to host the video using YouTube but embed it on your site, we’d recommend adding the transcript to the page on which you embed your video). Here’s an example of how we’ve done it in the past:

      http://www.audiotranscription.org/sample/

      Hope this helps! Of course, if you’d like help transcribing your videos, please reach out (http://www.audiotranscription.org/contact-us/). We’d be happy to offer you a volume discount.


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