4 Strategic Ways to Use Video Transcription in Business and Education

4 Ways Businesses and Educators Can Use Video Transcripts

Video transcription is a written version of the spoken content in a video. Where video captions appear on the video in sentences that go with each scene, a video transcript appears separately from the video.

Video transcription is the foundation for creating video captions as well as foreign language translations. While it may be a stepping stone to more advanced media data, a video transcription alone can be a great asset for universities and businesses alike.

1. Improve SEO

SEO is a leading component of any online marketing campaign. Google reported over 2 trillion searches in 2016 or about 100 billion searches per month. Over the course of this year, 74% of all search traffic will be for video.

For SEO to work, web pages must first be crawled and then entered into a search engine’s index. Only once a web page is indexed, can it be found through a Google search. In the case of online videos, search engines are unable to crawl the actual video content because only text, not spoken word, is visible to them.

Businesses can overcome this indexing obstacle and enable successful SEO for video by using the video’s transcription data. This tactic creates a textual representation of the spoken content in videos, allowing search engines to crawl all of your video’s content and index the video accurately.

With only 8.5% of online search traffic making it to the second page of Google search, SEO enabled videos are a crucial advantage.

How to Format Your Video Transcription for SEO

The transcription should be pasted directly into the description section of the video or into the HTML of each of the web pages where your videos are hosted.

Make sure to take the time to format the transcript itself according to the standard hierarchy that you would use on any page. For instance, include Title, H2, bullets and other organizational page elements that effectively communicate to a search engine that your content is essential.

Without applying these page elements, you may be adversely affecting your SEO ranking. Careful not to hide content either, as that will be noticed by search engines and your SEO ranking will be negatively affected.

2. Provide a Studying Aid for Students

transcription Colleges and universities are required to caption online lectures and videos by the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Captioned videos ensure that deaf and hard of hearing individuals have equal access to educational content.

While video transcripts are not adequate for accessibility, they are still greatly useful for all students. By including video transcription along with a video lecture, educators give their students various new ways to interact with and study the material. These include:

Reading along the with video
Printing and annotating the transcription
Searching for specific terms
Referring back to a question without watching the entire video again

3. Easily Make New Content

Video transcription boosts video ROI by letting you easily create more content.

The average five-minute video contains about 150 words per minute, which comes out to 750 words total. This is surprisingly in line with the length of the average blog article. For marketers and content creators, repurposing content for different mediums is vital.

Video transcripts can be taken and turned into a variety of different content types, such as:

eBooks
Blog articles
Product descriptions
FAQs
Infographics
Emails

Depending on the nature of your video, it can be repurposed into one or more of the above content types.

For example, you can take the transcription of a webinar, pick out the key takeaways, and make a blog article. If the webinar goes into great detail on relevant information, it could even be made into an entire eBook.

4. Provide Long Lasting Understanding & Reinforcement for Everyone

While closed captions are the best aid to ensure that everyone can understand your videos, video transcripts provide an excellent way for viewers to interact further with the content. They can read along with the video, print the transcription, highlight confusing words, and search and find keywords.

For people who speak English as a second or foreign language, the written version of a video’s dialogue helps clarify any speaker accents that the viewer may not be familiar with.

Additionally, video transcripts allow viewers to go back and quickly find what they are looking for without having to rewatch the whole video.

Whether you are communicating with your students, employees, or the general public, video transcripts ensure long-lasting understanding and reinforcement for everyone.