Did you know that adding transcriptions to your content marketing videos can actually give a boost to your SEO rankings?

You already know that video is currently the most effective way to share your brand message with your audience. Video is dominating content marketing because it’s dynamic, searchable, and shareable. Video can be used to drive your audience to your call to action, and it’s a great way to boost your audience engagement while entertaining or educating your customers and driving fresh leads through your funnel.

Transcripts Add More SEO Fuel

If you’re already using video to drive your content marketing plan, you’ll be interested to know that you can get even more bang for your buck using quality, accurate video transcriptions. SEO relies on keywords to determine which pieces of content are most likely to delight your audience and prevent the dreaded bounce, when a Googler clicks a link that isn’t what they’re looking for and quickly “bounces” back out to the search engine for another try. What video transcripts allow you to do is add valuable text to the spoken content to make your videos more visible to the search engines.

Meta descriptions and video tags can only take you so far, because a transcript is not just a snippet but a complete textual restatement of the contents in the video. Since search engines crawl text for indexing purposes, a transcript allows those search engines to grab more data and match up more potential keywords.

Integrate More Keywords with Video Transcript

Placing a transcript below a video is a natural way to integrate more of your keyword phrases throughout the page that’s hosting the video. You also fit in more secondary and tertiary keywords, otherwise known as the “context” words that help the search engine figure out what your piece of content is really all about.

For example, someone searching for the keyword “shingles” in Google could be looking for information on roofing or for a list of symptoms. Secondary and tertiary keywords surrounding the main keyword, such as “roofs” or “diagnosis” can help to provide the context that helps the search engine understand what content is being offered and which results to return to the searcher.

Video Transcripts Can Lower Bounce Rate

 An accurate transcript is what’s going to help you avoid content bounce and keep your audience on your page longer, giving them time to absorb your message and act on your call to action. If your video content and the video landing page are misaligned in any way, you could be luring the wrong audience members who aren’t looking for what you’re offering. This raises your bounce rate, as the clickers realize that they clicked on the wrong thing and promptly leave. Maintaining a low bounce rate helps you get found, because it teaches the search engines that you have highly relevant content that people want to see.

Video transcripts are also great for long term search queries! As you know, most people use Google to ask questions or search short phrases, not just single words at a time. These are known as “long form” or “long tail” search queries. For example, a short keyword would be “garden”, while a longtail query that would be typed into Google might be “best perennial garden plants”. It’s a more specific search that presents content providers with the opportunity to grab a more specific, engaged audience. By simply providing search engines with more text to crawl, including a video transcript increases your SEO mojo.

Try offering a video transcript if your business needs to attract more engaged audience members, lower your bounce rate, and increase your searchability on all of the big search engines.