Speaker 1: Should you transcribe your podcast? Transcriptions are a huge consideration for so many people, and very often they become a bit of a tick box when it comes to a feature comparison on software or podcast players for your website. But realistically, we need to know more. Realistically, we need to dig into transcriptions a little bit more to look at whether or not it's actually worth it. So in this piece of content, I'm going to dig into whether or not you should transcribe your podcast. And it's actually part of just a bigger suite of podcast marketing that we're digging into because transcriptions really a part of the podcast marketing suite. They're not really about the content. They're about the marketing. They're about accessibility. What I want you to do is before we dig into this content, go and check out captivate.fm forward slash marketing. It's a big tutorial on how to market your podcast, and I promise you you will learn from that tutorial. All right, go and check it out now. It's at captivate.fm forward slash marketing. Podcast transcription can be a bit of a black hole. It can be something that's very difficult to do. What I'm not going to do on this episode is talk about the how. Okay, I'm not going to talk about how to transcribe your podcast. That's another topic. That's for another day. And there are tools and services out there that will help you to do that. The bottom line with the how before we get to the should you and the why, the bottom line with the how is this, that you can really take two options. You've got the automated route using online tools like Descript and so on and so forth. Or you can pay someone to do it, and paying someone to do it is always going to be more accurate. So you could use someone like Rev.com, R-E-V.com. Both fantastic services, one automated, one manual and personal, and obviously costs associated with that. They're not actually that expensive if you are truly deeply looking at growing your audience. So we're not going to talk about the how. They're the options. Go and check them out, Descript and Rev.com. We are here to talk about the why. Should you transcribe your audio? Well, let's break this down into two distinct sections. Accessibility and marketing. Accessibility is making your content available to everyone regardless of their ability to access content in its intended format. So what I'm talking about here is audio content. What if someone is hard of hearing? Okay, what if someone is very, very, very hard of hearing and can't access your content as you originally intended? We are not letting them access our content. We're not letting them enjoy the content. We are not being accessible if we don't provide transcripts. And that's something that we believe the entire industry is moving towards. Of course, we want to make our medium as accessible as possible to everyone. So hosts like Captivate.fm are working hard to make podcasting the industry as accessible as possible. So from an accessibility perspective, it would be fantastic if you transcribed your podcast. Yes, of course. But it's not just about accessibility. That's almost a given. The problem with accessibility is that there aren't really many places to display your transcript. All right, so yes, you can put it on your website. Yes, places like Captivate's website support transcription. Yes, WordPress, either via Captivate Sync or your own built WordPress site. You can paste the transcription in. That's fairly easy to do. We're all kind of working as podcasters and as podcast hosts trying to work on a better way of displaying these transcripts in podcast apps. There's an argument around, do we need to? Because if someone can use a podcast app fairly well, you know, there's an argument that would we need the transcription? Would it not be better to present a more transcribed experience in something else? Does it need to be in a podcast app? Who knows? It's something for us all as an industry to figure out. But right now, the RSS feeds don't necessarily support dedicated transcription. It's something that we are working on with Captivate. Can we work a standard up where there is a standard RSS tag? And I know some other hosts are working with us on that. Some of the app providers. Really, our goal is to try and progress RSS so that it supports transcripts more natively. That would be fantastic for accessibility. So to draw a line under accessibility, if you can transcribe your show, your episodes, it will be better for people who are hard of hearing. And that is always a great thing. What about the marketing side? Well, I'm gonna tell you straight. Transcribing your podcast is not going to change your numbers instantly. It won't. I'm really, really sorry to say that, but it won't. It's not gonna get you any more listeners. It's not gonna do anything right now to help with your growth. However, that's not to say that it's not valuable from a search engine optimisation and from a marketing perspective. And the reason is the long tail. The long tail. The long tail is where you gather up small pockets of traffic based on very, very specific long tail search phrases. So when someone searches for something exceptionally specific, if you have transcribed your show, you stand a great chance of one of those phrases that appear in your show being surfaced from your website and your episode being presented in the search results for a very specific search term. Something very phrase oriented. That's not to say that you're gonna gather up a lot of traffic. But if you do this across 100 episodes and each episode gathers up 100 search results and search rankings and clicks every single month, you start to generate a little bit more traffic than you are now. But it doesn't work overnight. It's not like ranking for a big, broad key phrase. This is called the long tail, and that's where transcriptions come in handy. Of course, it's great to be able to provide people with an option to read it if they want to read it. But people want to use transcriptions for SEO. Here's the honest thing. It's not going to help your SEO right away. It will help it over the long term to some degree. It's not gonna change the world for you. It's not gonna generate a huge audience, and you shouldn't be making decisions on the software you use on your website just because it says on a feature list supports transcripts. Everything supports transcripts because you can just copy and paste them into anywhere, all right? So don't be buying software because it supports transcripts for your website. There's no need for that, all right? In short, I think everyone should be moving towards transcribing the podcast. It's something that we're working on for our internal podcast right now. I think you should be doing that from an accessibility standpoint first and foremost, and I think as a byproduct of doing that, if you supply the transcripts to your website into your RSS feed, when most of the players begin to support that in the future, then you will stand a chance of ranking better for longer tail key phrases. And also remember that Apple, Google, they're also transcribing your podcast for you in order to be able to serve your episodes up to the right people at the right time. This does work because the big players are doing it in the background already. So think about transcription. Should you be doing that? How do you do it? Would you want to do it? And primarily, let's be honest about the fact that it's not going to help your SEO right now, but over the long term, it might just do that.