In less than two decades since its inception, YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon and the undisputed champion of video marketing. Creating a presence of it or even using its content in its marketing is a huge boost for any business.
As the platform continues to evolve, content creators and businesses need to keep up with the changes and trends to ace them.
In this article, we take a look at how transcription of YouTube videos not just helps create more value out of them but helps you boost your SEO and edge out your competition. Read on to know more.
The SEO benefits of YouTube video transcription
YouTube has emerged as the second largest search engine after its parent company Google itself. It has over 37 million content creators with over 1 billion hours of content being watched every day. The platform’s SEO potential is unmatched.
Many businesses make the mistake of choosing quantity over quality as they think creating frequent content will keep them in the eyes of the consumer more. That is not true. Creating quality content will help you secure better leads and engage with them better.
This is where video transcription comes in. It helps you create valuable video content that directly helps boost your SEO while helping you curate a well-crafter video library as well. Let’s take a look at some of the most prominent SEO benefits of YouTube video transcription:
1. Make it accessible
The biggest, most important benefit of video transcription for YouTube is the reach it gives you. A business such as a B2B SEO company relies on connecting with its audience to generate interest in them to make sales.
Video transcription helps companies do exactly that by making the video content they create become accessible on the platform. There are many groups to whom and situations where videos are unconsumable through no fault of the video itself.
Video transcriptions help empower the groups and situations to allow easy consumption of the video and allow the business to connect with its audience, something it would not be able to do otherwise. Here are some of them:
a) Visually impaired people
Over 48 million Americans and 360 people worldwide suffer from disabling hearing issues. This group of audience cannot consume a video unless it’s subtitled. So, no matter how good your video is, it will fail to connect with such a significant audience group without video transcription.
Transcribe your YouTube videos so that you can reach a wide variety of people in your audience group. On the other hand, people who do not suffer from any hearing issues are also bound to appreciate more accessible content.
Moreover, several laws require video content by businesses to have closed captioning to be easily accessed by all groups, the hearing impaired included. Video transcription will also help you comply with rules regarding video content.
B) Worldwide accessibility
YouTube videos that are well-transcribed become universal. A transcribed video will be easier to consume by an audience that may not even be the initial target. They’ll be more likely to engage with it as it has become accessible to them.
For example, if you create a video in English and put English subtitles on it, people in Asian countries whose first language isn’t English but understand it will be able to understand the content with ease.
Moreover, you can also create a video in some other language, say Spanish, and put English subtitles to make it universally accessible. This way, people who don’t speak Spanish will also be able to consume it as English is the most common language in the world.
c) Sound-sensitive areas
Even when people are fully capable of hearing and understanding the language being spoken in the video, your video content might not be accessible to them through no fault of their own but because of their surroundings.
They may be in the public or a crowd with no headphones. Or they may be in sound-sensitive environments such as a library. Or they simply cannot or don’t want to turn up the volume to hear what is being said.
By having captions, you allow them to consume the video without putting any effort into hearing what is being said. They can stay the way they are and still understand the video without needing sound at all. This makes them more willing to engage with it.
2. YouTube has updated its policy for translation
We talked about the translation of the videos above. YouTube has itself come forward to make content more accessible via translation now. The platform will automatically translate the captions, titles, and descriptions of videos in the language they’re being searched.
This means that if your video fits particular search criteria, it will show up on the result with a translation provided by YouTube. This gives businesses an edge and incentive to use YouTube video transcription to text to allow for smooth translation.
As a business, you should look to seek the most benefit out of this initiative by YouTube. Video transcribing your videos and putting SEO-friendly keywords in there will help the platform pick up on them and present them in the search results, helping you reach a wider audience.
3. You don’t want automatically transcribed videos
To make videos on its platform more accessible to various audience groups, YouTube has taken to transcribe videos itself. This means that if a video doesn’t have captions on its own, YouTube will put automatically generated ones on it.
This may seem like a positive as you don’t have to put in the effort of putting up subtitles. But it’s not. It can work to your detriment as the automatically generated subtitles are usually not accurate. They can get words wrong due to different accents.
This has the dual negative effect of having the wrong subtitles on your videos as well as letting your audience know that you did not put the effort into creating the video. Instead of relying on automated subtitles, put subtitles yourself.
It will stop YouTube from putting subtitles on its own as well as help your audience understand your content better. You will be creating high-quality content that is sure to be appreciated by your target audience.
4. Increase watch time
Another direct SEO advantage of adding transcription to your YouTube videos is the increased watch time that comes with it. When your videos are properly transcribed, your audience will be more willing to engage with them.
While a user may opt out of a video that doesn’t have subtitles due to various reasons such as not understanding it or not being engaged by it, captioning simply eliminates those issues. A captioned video immediately gets the attention of a user.
It instantly lets them know what is happening in the video, capturing their attention and making them stay on your content. It increases the watch time of your content and lowers the bounce rate on your page.
5. Include YouTube videos on your website
YouTube videos don’t just get you engagement on the platform, they can be used to attract and engage users of your own website as well. Include YouTube videos on your blogs and articles about related content.
By captioning your videos, you help Google and YouTube know the context of your video better during the crawl. You can include keywords you wish to rank for in your subtitles and they will be picked up by the search engine during the crawl. This is where an SEO company can help you create optimized subtitles with keywords that you wish to rank for.
It will directly help you improve your SEO ranking as the search engine will present your video in the search results for those keywords now. The more keywords a search engine picks during a crawl, the higher the chances are of your video making it further up the results.
Video transcription on YouTube videos creates quality, accessible content that directly boosts SEO
Video marketing is on the rise and YouTube has emerged as a pioneer in the field. Businesses and content creators seek to create a presence on the platform to boost their SEO.
Video transcription is one such way to boost your SEO on the YouTube platform as it helps you create quality content that will be easily accessible to various audience groups.
With YouTube itself promoting video captioning and even translating, creating captioned videos helps you take advantage of the platform’s policies better.
Let us know in the comments what you think is the most prominent SEO advantage of video captioning on YouTube.
Author bio
Atreyee Chowdhury is a freelance content writer with more than 10+ years of professional experience. She’s passionate about helping SMBs and enterprises achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time. You can follow her on LinkedIn.
