How Audio Transcription Can Boosts Web Content

Transcription is the process of converting video and audio content into text. You can use automated transcription solutions or human transcriptionists for this or combine the two. How can this text component complement your audio and video content in conveying information to your audience? Read on to find out!

Why Use Audio and Video Transcription for Your Content?

There are countless reasons why you need video transcription for all kinds of content. In this article, we'll focus on the eight most important benefits of converting video and audio into text.

Increased Accessibility

Content accessibility is probably the most crucial benefit of transcription. Closed captions were initially developed to offer an equally entertaining experience for people with hearing impairments. They're synchronized text that plays along with the original content, and a transcript is the full plain text version of generated captions.

There are over 48 million Americans and more than 360 million people worldwide suffering from hearing loss. Transcription helps these people consume content and increases your audience at the same time.

Improved Comprehension

Transcripts and closed captions can greatly enhance the viewing or listening experience for people who aren't native speakers, offering the option to read along while they go through the content. Watching captioned videos also helps kids improve their literacy by offering greater processing depth by increasing focus, resulting in easier vocabulary acquisition and allowing learners to understand the meaning by unpacking language chunks.

Legal Compliance

According to certain estimations, around 60% of hearing-impaired Americans are in the workforce or an educational setting. Several anti-discrimination laws have been passed in the United States to protect their rights and ensure they can access the same resources available to the rest of the population. Some of these laws make closed captions mandatory for publicly published video content, such as TV and other media regulated by the FCC.

Closed captioning requirements are part of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973). They also often apply to Section 504. The updated Section 508 was released in 2017, referencing WCAG 2.0 guidelines as the necessary accessibility standards, which include audio description and captioning requirements.

SEO Benefits

Industry experts know a thing or two about how audio transcription can boost web content. It's no secret that adding transcripts to your videos, podcasts, streams, and other types of content greatly improves SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines have no way of watching videos or listening to audio files and extracting data from them. By adding transcripts to your content, search engines can crawl the text data from your audio or video content and index it properly.

According to YouTube, videos with captions get 13.5% more views in the first two weeks and 7.3% more lifetime views. On top of that, you can paginate long transcripts (for podcasts and similar content) and optimize them for specific keywords to further optimize your content's search rank.

Enhanced User Experience (UX)

Providing transcripts with your video and audio makes it significantly easier for viewers to navigate through the content. Aside from search engines being able to crawl through the text and bring more traffic to it, you'll make it easier for your audience to find the content they're interested in. By searching for specific keywords and seeing where they appear in a particular video, audio, or even your whole library, the audience won't have to waste time scrubbing through them manually.

Depending on the platform, they can even use the search results to click on a specific word in the transcript that will take them to an exact point in the content so they can watch or listen to the segment they want.

Easier Translation

Getting a transcript is the first step toward translation or creating subtitles in a different language. It's important to know that over 80% of views on YouTube come from outside the United States. Interestingly enough, eight of the ten countries with the most YouTube users are non-English speaking countries, so the demand for video and audio translation is higher than ever. Aside from making your content available to a wider global audience, translated transcripts can also boost SEO efforts in different parts of the world.

Derivative Content Creation

Countless market researchers and content creators create video and audio clips they use for their content. These can be anything from converted voice memos and clips made with smartphones to professional content made by a production team. Sifting through all that footage can be quite a challenge. With transcripts, things become a lot easier, especially if you plan to repurpose your content.

With a simple copy-paste action, you can get direct quotes from your video or audio recording, create outlines for a report, study guides, blog posts, social media content, ebooks, etc.

Flexible Viewing

A video transcript or closed captions can make your videos available in situations where using audio is not an option. If a viewer is in a library, office, train, or a crowded street, they can't just turn up the volume, so there's a high chance they'll simply move on to something else. The text component will make your content accessible even on mute.

Playing videos automatically without the audio component being turned on is very common on social media sites. According to some sources, almost 85% of videos on Facebook are played without sound, so closed captions and transcripts become the only way to relay information to the viewer.

Final Thoughts

Whether you're a global brand, a small local company, or an up-and-coming content creator, understanding the importance of transcription for expanding your reach is essential. If you're looking for a way to turn video and audio recordings into text, GoTranscript's experts can produce transcripts, captions, and subtitles for your content quickly and accurately without breaking the bank!