Transcribing Audio and Video Content Is Vital for Search Optimization – Here’s Why

As the world has increasingly turned digital, much of the competition for audience attention takes place online. With countless blogs, websites, and other sources of information vying for people’s time, having content that is easily discoverable is critical for long-term success.

While audio and video are engaging formats, search engines have difficulty understanding and indexing them compared to written text. By transcribing audiovisual content into a written transcript, companies can optimize it for search.

Transcription allows the key terms and topics discussed in either audio or video to be parsed and picked up by search engine crawlers. This post will expand on this premise and more to give you an idea of how vital the written word still is regarding SEO.

Boost Search Ranking With Transcription

Any business worth its salt will have at least a glancing knowledge about the importance of SEO and what it means to have their entity at the top of the search results. Although the world is rapidly moving towards video and audio (to a degree), search algorithms still struggle to understand and index these formats as efficiently as text.

Moreover, some services simply don’t lend themselves as well to video as they might the written word. By using a transcription company, you can easily turn all of your existing audiovisual content into text in order to post to your website and allow the algos to do their thing. Transcripts provide search engines with readable text to analyze for relevant keywords, topics, and context.

They reveal what content is about in a way crawlers can understand. With the correct terms and phrases in text form, audio and video stand a much stronger chance of ranking for important search queries.

Closed Captions Increase User Engagement

Even if you believe your enterprise can better utilize a video-focused approach to marketing, it can pay dividends to have them transcribed and then uploaded alongside the video as closed captioning.

Not only will this enable the bots that crawl the video sites to understand your content better, but it can open up a whole new audience who are hitherto unable to use the content. For instance, those with hearing impairments can use closed captions to understand what they’re seeing.

Moreover, some people are simply unable to cope with audio stimulation and prefer to read a text version of what they’re seeing on their screens. The more people you have engaged with your content, the better it is for your rankings.

Optimize For Voice Search Technology

While voice search hasn’t been as massive as many believed it to be a few years ago, it is still used by an extensive section of web users. Voice search listens for spoken requests rather than scanned text, making audiovisual materials more discoverable through this emerging channel.

Transcription helps here by extracting the primary topics, keywords, and key phrases discussed vocally. With transcripts in hand, companies can better integrate optimized language into site content aimed at the voice channel.

Regardless of the content you produce, you need to rank well in the various search engines if you want to gain any sort of meaningful traction. Having text versions of your A/V content can massively help you in this regard and include those who prefer to read or are unable to hear.