Do Podcasts Need Transcription?

Yes.

First, what is a podcast? It is a series of episodes where spoken word digital audio files can be streamed or downloaded for listening. 

How many podcasts are there? According to Podcast Insights, there are over 43 million episodes as of JAN 2021. 

How many shows are there? Nearing 2 million! 

Yet, there is still plenty of room to launch an additional podcast. According to Edison Research, the number of Americans listening to a podcast each week has grown 120% over the past four years, and 90 million Americans listen to a podcast every month. 

However, it is essential to make the podcast easy to find on the internet and catch the prospective listeners’ and followers’ attention. One of the great ways to do it is to rely on SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.

There are few tricks on how to enhance your podcast’s SEO performance. For example, think of topics and keywords carefully in planning, describing, and delivering your podcast. You can use various SEO tools to check for the words relevant to your topic of the field of interest and help you stand out easier in global Google search. And ultimately, the transcription of your podcast will bring you the benefits of a useful SEO application. 

How big is the effect? +15% increase in organic traffic, +50% keyword lift, some SEO agencies claim. 

So, in a nutshell, you should transcribe your podcast because:

- AI-based automatic transcriptions search engines may not do the justice for the efforts you put into your podcast

- A good transcription enables better identification of the topic(s) covered in your podcast and leads to more effective online discoverability

- Transcription could help the accessibility of your content. You can read more on that in our other blog entry on Audio Transcription Boosting Web Accessibility. 

Ready to transcribe your next podcast? CLICK HERE and check out what Go Transcript has to offer to you regarding our podcast transcription services. 

Learn more about our latest thinking on podcasts: 

Guide on How to Improve SEO with Podcast Transcriptions

Guide on How to Make your Podcast Rank Higher