If you are looking to improve your SEO performance, you might already know about the benefits of including videos on your website. Videos are an excellent way to increase your site’s visibility and ranking on search engines. But there is an even more powerful tool in your SEO-boosting toolbox that you may be less aware of: video transcription. How does a simple transcription help to bolster your SEO? Here are three ways.

Video Transcription SEO Boost 1: Accurate Indexing

Including a transcript to accompany the videos you post on your site allows search engines to more accurately index your site’s video pages, making it much more likely that they will appear in searches and thereby increasing inbound traffic. The text from a transcript is much more likely to match user searches than a short video title. As Marc Roberts, writing for Tubular Insights, points out, “Liveclicker studied 37 pages before and after adding transcripts. Pages with transcripts earned on average 16% more revenue than they did before transcripts. Why? The uplift was likely related to increases in traffic through long-tail keyword searches resulting from matches in the transcripts.”

Video Transcription SEO Boost 2: Sustained Viewer Engagement

In addition to the complex issue of more accurate indexing, video transcripts will boost SEO for a simple, low-tech reason: people tend to stay more engaged in a video when they have an accompanying transcript to refer to. There are many reasons for this; some viewers just enjoy the ability to carefully track the speaker’s message. Some may prefer reading through the text in lieu of watching and listening to the speaker in a video (especially if they are without headphones in an environment that won’t allow for audio). Still other viewers may be viewing the video in hopes of quoting it on social media, in an conversation, or even in their own writing.

For many reasons, video transcripts ensure higher engagement with a page. But what does sustained engagement have to do with SEO? Longer “dwell time,” which is basically a measure of a user’s session duration, equals better SEO. Neil Patel, writing for Search Engine Journal, explains: “User behavior matters for SEO, and Google actively measures such user behavior to help shape the algorithm… Dwell time most definitely impacts SEO. If a user is spending time on a site, interacting with it, not bouncing, and going deeper within the content, it’s evident there is something of value on the site for that particular user. As this happens, SEO improves.”

Video Transcription SEO Boost 3: Opportunity for Additional High-Quality Content

Beyond the above SEO hacks, video transcriptions provide you with a treasure trove of quotes to use in service of additional content creation for other parts of your site. Spin-off content opportunities abound: blog posts analyzing information from videos, infographics which visually represent key points, engaging graphics that benefit the design of your site. All of this inspired content can incorporate some of your priority keywords while maintaining the appeal of the original content, furthering your SEO goals.

If you are ready to take your site’s visibility to the next level, contact us to discuss your video transcription needs!