Transcribe Audio to Text And Maximize Your SEO Strategy

More Content to Crawl

When you transcribe your audio to text, you’re reusing material that’s already created. In essence, you’re doubling the amount of content you have. While you want to maintain a certain standard of quality, SEO is partially a quantity game. And just like athletes (or managers of paper companies) like to say, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. Having more content to crawl only helps your SEO.

Improve User Experience

It’s a general rule of thumb that people enjoy getting to control their user experience. That’s not just opinion – a Forrester study showed that a better user experience (UX) design could increase conversion rates by up to 400 percent. Making things easy for your users makes it more likely you’ll turn them into customers. Transcribing your audio to text allows them to choose their preferred way of digesting information.

More Information To Provide and Link To

Imagine if this blog post were a podcast. There could be a really neat stat here, something like the country that listens to the most podcasts is South Korea, where 58 percent of people do so. Or maybe you think that 233 million people own smartphones is a more interesting fact. Both of those link to cool sites with additional information on podcasting, smartphones, and a whole lot more. If you didn’t transcribe your audio to text, it would be more difficult to share any extra information with your audience. Sure, you could read off a stat, but if fans wanted to learn more, they’d either have to search online themselves or listen to you read off a clunky long URL. Neither approach is as simple or convenient as transcribing your audio and linking to additional info.

Different Approaches for Different Users/Readers

You may have the perfect content for someone in your audience. It would help 100 percent of the problems they currently have, and it’ll make them grow stronger for the future. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Now imagine this: that person never listens to your audio file with all that content. Why? Well, maybe they’re in a crowded area where they can’t hear sound. Maybe their speakers are broken, or they don’t have their headphones. Whatever it is, do you really want to take a chance on them missing out on what you’re offering? Why not offer the option to read your content instead of – or in addition to – listening to it?

More People Who Can Click and Share

Listening to an audio file is more of a passive activity than reading an article. You could be doing the laundry or exercising and are still able to digest something if it’s being spoken to you. That’s a nice benefit, but it’s a lot harder to click and share content if it’s not written out. In fact, outside of clicking the play or stop buttons, it’s doubtful your audience will take any other action. When you transcribe audio to text, though, it’s a lot easier for your audience to take that extra step and share your post with their network, introducing your brand to hundreds or even thousands of potential new fans.

Higher Time on Page

Captions are a great way to get your audience to engage more by sticking around longer. Adding captions to a video on YouTube raises watch time by up to 40%. That’s good enough on its own, but consider the occasions when your audience might need captions.

Promote Viewer Flexibility

Is one of your audience members hard of hearing (35 million adults experience some form of hearing loss)? Are they in sound-sensitive environments, like a quiet library or a noisy train? It’s highly unlikely everyone you’re trying to reach is in the perfect setting to watch a video. Luckily, by transcribing audio to text, you’re promoting viewer flexibility and allowing your audience to choose what works best for them. That’s a boost to the overall UX of your site, and your audience will appreciate it.

Create AB Tests

One of the best things you can do when developing content is to create AB tests. At its core, AB testing is taking content you already have and tweaking it a bit to see what resonates best with your audience. For instance, you could come up with two different titles for your transcript and keep an eye on which one people are flocking to more frequently. Or you could pull out key quotes from your file and see if your audience is more drawn to one in particular.

You can even take AB tests to social media. Try two separate images to promote your post, or use two slightly distinct sentences in your copy. Be mindful only to change one thing at a time so you can be sure the tweaks you make are what’s resonating with your audience. It’s like you’re a scientist testing a hypothesis, just without a fancy lab coat.

Rank for Related Keywords

The way we used to target keywords has shifted. Instead of needing to match a phrase exactly, search engines can often identify a user’s intent. In the earlier days of search engines, if someone wanted to find the No. 1 song on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 Charts in, say, the week of September 5, 1998, they’d have to type in, “what was the number one song on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 Charts on September 5, 1998?”

That’s a long, cumbersome phrase, and thankfully that isn’t the norm anymore. Today, you can simply type “billboard march 1998 top” and the first search result is a list of the top songs on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 each week of 1998. And in case you were wondering, Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” was number one the week of September 5, 1998. We can pause a moment while you unleash your best Steven Tyler yell.

Why does this matter? By knowing search engines look for intent rather than exact phrasing, there’s power in related keywords. One piece of content can rank for multiple phrases, which is a fantastic way to gain new audiences. Chances are that if you’re trying to rank for a phrase like “online marketing,” your audio file will have several related keywords, too. You’ll rank for all of them if you transcribe your audio to text. You can also use a tool like LSIGraph to see what other words are related to your primary keyword.