WHY YOU NEED TO ADD TRANSCRIPTS TO YOUR VIDEOS

Whether you’re watching television or pop a DVD into your home movie system, Hollywood has made it easier than ever to understand what is being said on the screen. Subtitles allow the hearing impaired to enjoy video content just as much as the rest of us – and hardcore fanatics ensure that they never miss a word of their favorite programming. But did you know that subtitles aren’t exclusive to major Hollywood productions?

With its state-of-the-art voice recognition software, Google has made it easier than ever to sync transcripts with your marketing videos to create closed captioning for the audibly impaired. But what if we told you that there are other benefits to transcripts and closed captioning as well? The reality is not only does the text help your audience better understand the content of your video, but it also helps your video fuel search engine results.

Here’s what you need to consider if your brand uploads a video to YouTube.

YouTube makes it easy to sync your transcript with audio.

Don’t worry, there’s no hard work to syncing your transcript with audio when it’s spoken in your video – literally! Thanks to Google’s voice recognition software, all you have to do is upload your transcript to YouTube after you upload your video. Simply press the “sync” button and the software will automatically go through your transcript and sync it with your audio. Gone are the days of doing it manually yourself. It seriously couldn’t be any easier!

So why would you want to upload your transcript to YouTube?

The benefits are twofold:

1. You can reach a larger audience. Because the option for closed captioning is only available for brands that upload a transcript alongside their video, you ensure that the hearing impaired can enjoy your video content as well. This increases the scope and reach of your brand.
2. You earn SEO benefits. Your transcript becomes a type of “written” content for your video that Google can crawl and search for keywords. This can be added to the metadata for your video and results in a powerful synergy that not only helps your video rank higher on YouTube, but on Google as well.

Avoid using YouTube’s auto transcribe feature.

While some brands might be tempted to take advantage of YouTube’s auto-transcribe feature, it’s important to note that it’s much more effective to upload your own transcript. You see, the software isn’t yet perfected, so auto-transcribe will result in closed captioning that is largely garble. It isn’t accurate, will frustrate your viewers, and provides no SEO benefit. This is why it’s so much more beneficial and effective to keep the script of your video and upload it as the transcript.

Furthermore, there’s been increasing evidence that Google and YouTube are using closed captions for video SEO and indexing videos based on the terms and verbiage found within the transcript. While this isn’t necessarily “groundbreaking,” it’s important to note that most brands aren’t taking advantage of this feature – and with no upcoming trend in sight, you can take advantage of a feature that provides incredible benefits without your competitors catching on.

Are you optimizing your video for search engine indexing?