When it comes to content that resonates with users, video is clearly the winner. According to the Cisco Video Networking Index, video traffic will grow fourfold from 2017 through 2022. Live streaming is a popular option among consumers for Q&As and product demonstrations, and businesses are leveraging live video to boost engagement with their brand. Video transcription services support search engine optimization (SEO) and play a key role in helping you get the word out to a wider audience.
Why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Important for Video
SEO involves using certain techniques to help businesses gain online visibility. SEO specialists carefully monitor Google algorithm updates and help businesses optimize their content, including video, to rank as highly as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). With the rising importance of video content over the past decade, SEO for video has become more crucial than ever. In 2020, 96% of consumers increased their online video consumption and up to 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business, according to a Hubspot study. Social media marketing has reached new levels with go-to video platforms like YouTube, TikTok, FaceBook and Instagram.
The benefits of using video to promote your business are:
- Is a powerful way to tell a story and get your message across to a wide audience, including all age groups.
- Can convey large amounts of information in a short period of time.
- Effective way to capture attention of mobile users as video content can be easily viewed on mobile devices. With more and more people shopping and researching products on tablets and smartphones, publishing video content to target mobile device users has become extremely significant.
Video content will likely remain relevant for years to come. But simply creating and posting videos cannot enhance your online presence. Relevant and well-targeted video content with an effective SEO strategy is essential to get higher rankings and boost your marketing campaign. Media transcription services play an important role in using video content for SEO.
SEO Benefits of Video Transcripts
As SEO companies will tell you, getting a website to show up on Google’s first page involves a lot of hard work. Video makes their job easier. Video SEO involves several techniques to rank well in search results for the right keywords and phrases. These tactics include doing research to find keywords that are ranking currently for your niche, creating content to target your audience, using the keywords in the video’s title and meta description, adding timestamps, ensuring an engaging thumbnail, inserting a strong CTA, and adding a transcript.
Transcripts are a text version of the video and posted along with it. Reports indicate that video transcription offers proven SEO benefits. A study by showed that, on average, web pages with transcripts earned 16% more revenue than those that did not have transcripts. Including captions and transcripts in your video content can help it rank higher, convey more information effectively, and attract a global audience. Here are 8 ways video transcription boosts SEO:
- Increases search traffic: Transcripts make video content more searchable. Search engines cannot watch videos and index them, but they can read and index transcripts and captions embedded in them. With transcripts, video platforms and search engines can crawl the complete file and index it.
- Drives engagement with the content: Some people may be interest in specific content in a video. Providing transcripts and captions along with the media content will allow them to find what they need easily compared to having to rely on the audio alone. If the text version is missing, visitors may look elsewhere for what the need.
- Allows people who are deaf and blind to access the content: Descriptive transcripts make video content accessible to people who are both deaf and blind. Transcripts are also important to people who process text information better than audio and visual/pictorial information, and people who don’t have access to the entire video and use screen readers due to vision impairments. With interactive transcripts that highlight text phrases as they are spoken, users can select the text and go to that point in the video. Up to 97% of students who participated in a study by MIT OpenCourseWare reported that interactive transcripts enhanced their learning experience. Improved access to your video content means improved SEO.
- Enables search for specific words: Transcripts allow users to scan and search for key phrases or words that have been used in the video. Keywords extracted from transcripts can be used for video sitemap tags, YouTube tags, and guide on-page SEO.
- Makes content accessible to a global audience speakers: With captions and transcripts, your video content becomes accessible to an audience across the world that does not speak English fluently, but are interested in the topic. They can translate the content and use it as required. When people understand the video content, it increases their shareability.
- Flexibility: With transcripts, viewers can watch video any place in sound-sensitive environments. Even if they are in a place where audio is unavailable or in a crowded train or street, transcripts and captions will convey the message. With transcripts, users can watch videos on mute in environments in quiet places such as a library or office. Video transcription allows you to connect with users who cannot engage with just video on its own.
- Lowers bounce rate: As transcripts increase engagement with your video and encourage visitors to stay longer on your website, this will reduce bounce rates. In this context, it is also important that your video content matches visitors’ search queries, or else they will leave without watching it.
- Generates link-building opportunities: SEO strategies include both internal and external link-building. Video transcripts provide support both. Transcripts help internal link-building by allowing you to link to other related content on your website. For instance, a plastic surgery video can be used to link to a page discussing the technology used to perform it. Transcripts can be used to create blogs on the topic that are optimized for SEO and allow visitors to move from one topic to another through the text. Coming to external links, a Moz study found that users linked most to content with videos, images, and lists. Transcripts make content more compelling and easy to share.
Transcripts offer an easy way to extend the reach of your video content. Doing it right is important for SEO success. Reach out to general transcription company providing video transcription services to ensure an accurate documentation of the content. Ensure relevant, keyword-rich content which will help your optimization efforts and your viewers to find what they need when they refer to the transcript. Repurposing transcripts into blog posts, including social media posts, can also go a long way to enhancing their potential to drive SEO.
