This is a guest post by our friend Mike Marani.
If you have a podcast, I’m sure you have heard about transcription. It’s simply putting your audio format into writing. And there are a boatload of services out there that will do this for you. Pretty much every podcaster knows that they should have show notes. These are great, and of great help to the listener who wants to follow up with what was talked about. But is transcription something that you should invest in?I’ll give you 2 good reasons to start transcribing your podcasts.
Transcribing Your Podcasts Increases Your SEO
Short-form and bulleted lists (typical show notes format) are not going to bring Google to your site as efficiently as conversational text will. The transcription of a conversation has the natural flow of how people talk, much like a blog post, and that’s what Google wants. They’re starting to monitor how people talk to understand how people search. Less people type “gardening tools plant beets” into Google, and more type “what tools should I use to plant beets?” Merely having a bulleted list of keywords is not as helpful as having a paragraph or more of people talking about those keywords (and multiple variations, e.g. gardening tools, hand tool, garden hoe, etc.) and their practical application in the given situation.
Written Content Has More Reach Than Audio Content
Let’s be honest, as (hipster) podcasters, we saw the value of delivering audio content to users long before Serial came along and made the format go viral. Podcasting has been around for decades, yet it still hasn’t taken over as the primary content delivery system. It’s been (over) stated that Content is King; which means written content is the just, benevolent king that everyone loves the most.There are a lot of people who don’t listen to podcasts, or maybe just don’t have as much time to listen to them. Having the transcription written out and optimized (so that Google will deliver it to relevant people) brings the content (and your show) to an even broader audience. Taking the time to create quality, keyword-rich content and then only sharing it as an audio file is like taking a boatload of potential website traffic and locking it up in a safe.So whether you’re going to do it yourself, or outsource it, you should seriously consider having all of your podcast episodes transcribed. If you want help with this process, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us! Fill out the form below and we can chat about what makes sense for you.
I was recently quoted in an article on how Transcripts Can Increase The Life of Your Podcasts.