Podcast Transcription and You: How Transcripts Can Help Your Podcast

Published: May 09, 2022

What can podcast transcriptions do for your podcast and your audience?

A whole lot, actually!

You may hear a lot of talk about podcast transcripts and wonder if you need to invest the time or money in them. Just like your podcast hosting platform and other tools, transcription can be valuable to you, your audience, and your podcast. But how do transcripts help?

Podcast Transcription Helps Your Audience

Listeners and their circumstances are as varied as podcasts themselves. When we think about our podcasts and how listeners engage with them, we need to consider all of those who we might reach. There can be issues that may stop potential listeners from engaging with audio only or even audio/video mediums.

Podcast transcription might bring to mind deaf or hard of hearing people who wish to interact with you and your content, but it goes far beyond that. For example, you may have potential listeners who are learning the language your podcast is in and may need some extra help with understanding verbal content. Transcripts are also helpful tools for someone that has an auditory processing disorder that makes it hard to discern what’s being spoken when they’re overstimulated.

Transcribing your podcast is also a great way to entice new listeners. Having your transcripts available is on par with having clips and embeddable players available; they offer anyone who stumbles on your content a quick way to sample your work. Think of it as a blurb found on the back of a book: it gives anyone perusing your site a glimpse into your work, and entices them to check out more.

Podcast Transcription Helps Your Podcast

Beyond helping you reach out to current and potential listeners, your transcriptions offer you something just as vital: better SEO.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the method of using keywords and phrases in a way so that you appear more in search results across the internet. The better your SEO, the more likely your content is to pop up in searches for topics that your podcast covers. Things like your podcast title, description, episode titles/descriptions, and even social media can help with SEO, but things like websites and blogs can also help immensely. 

However, what makes websites and blogs better for SEO is the amount of content that’s hosted there. If you’re not putting content there, you’re not creating the best environment for SEO. And with running and promoting a podcast, you may find that time is short for things like blog posts or articles.

By having transcripts, you’re creating more content for search engines to index and pull up for searches. Transcripts can go on your podcast’s website – either one you’ve made on your own, or one that you’ve been given by your podcast host – as material that directs search results to your podcast. They’re great content to have on your website/blog, as it lets you post content that is SEO friendly, while allowing you to work within your own personal bandwidth.

Some directories also take transcripts and allow listeners to use them in their search. You may have also been searching for a podcast on Apple Podcasts and seen that some words show up in quotes. Apple Podcasts helps podcasts become even more searchable as they are starting to allow their transcripts to be searchable. 

Podcast Transcription Helps You!

As a podcaster, you’re more than just the content creator; you are your own promotion team, financial consultant, customer service representative, and every other role under the sun (unless you have other people helping you out with that…then go you!). Marketing and promoting your podcast requires its own energy and mindful direction. Even with help, promoting your podcast can be quite an undertaking if you don’t know where to start or what direction to go.

Transcribing your podcast gives you a source of content that you can readily turn into promotional materials. From creating graphics with quotes, to captioning your audiograms/video clips, your transcriptions give you a quick source of content that can be spread to sites that offer text or image-only content. Try creating an audiogram or a still image with a quote from your show for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other popular platforms. While you may remember poignant lines in the moment (or during editing), having the transcript to turn back to and reference gives you a way to highlight the best parts of your podcast. 

Where Do You Get Podcast Transcripts?

When you decide to add transcripts to your podcast, you have several options to choose from. No matter your budget or personal bandwidth, there is an option available to you.

The first option is to create the transcript yourself. It may take some time, but if you’re serious about getting a transcript done and you’re not ready to allocate your budget for transcription, it’s definitely a direction to go. The best benefit here is that you understand your own accent and cadence, and will know if you accidentally misspoke a word that can be corrected. Oftentimes, you were also involved in the production of the show you’re transcribing. Who better to remember what was said than you?

If transcribing your podcast yourself isn’t an option, there are a wide variety of companies (from personal transcription to auto-generated options) to turn to that will transcribe your content for you. Several include:

These companies/services transcribe audio professionally, in a wide price range to suit all budgets. This means that they’re a bit faster than doing it yourself and know how best to format everything for getting your RSS feed to show your transcript (often by way of generating a .SRT file). Auto-generated transcription does mean that you may have to go back and read through the transcript itself to check for errors, but they handle the bulk of the work for you!

You could also go so far as to hire a transcriptionist to personally transcribe your content, if auto-generated options aren’t available or feasible. Podcast production companies may offer this as a service in tandem with their editing/producing work. This option works well for people who are also interested in looking into those services, such as business or podcast networks.

Regardless of what option you choose, they’re definitely worth the investment for the sake of making your podcast more inclusive and giving you more tools for promotion.

Podcast Transcripts: End Notes

Transcribing your podcast can do quite a bit for you and your podcast. Beyond making it more readily available to a larger audience, it gives your podcast an SEO boost and you new resources to put into marketing. Much like your podcast host, they’re an investment that you make for your podcast to help it grow into the best podcast it can be. Transcripts create a more inclusive environment for your podcast, can help your searchability, and can give you even more content for you to promote your podcast. What’s better than that?

Looking for other ways to help your podcast? Check out our post on SEO!

The post Podcast Transcription and You: How Transcripts Can Help Your Podcast appeared first on Podbean Blog.

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