They seem like disparate issues… you can caption and transcribe your video and audio files to meet accessibility requirements. You can also separately work to enhance SEO on your websites to increase online traffic and visibility. Oh, and searchable transcripts? Well, that’s just the icing on a very specific cake.

Actually, SEO and searchable transcripts align directly with your website accessibility compliance.

Using Transcripts for SEO

To start, let’s examine the role that audio transcripts play in your overall SEO performance. Many companies are now turning to audio and video to promote your organization or purpose. But because the web is built for text, not video or audio content, search engines need a text-based version of your content in order to crawl, rank and index any pages on your site containing those file types.

There are a number of other components that also impact your sites SEO, including your website security and accessibility, your page loading speed, mobility, website page copy, website age, your coding, how visitors interact with your site, your inbound and outbound linking, and your social sharing. Audio transcripts contribute to a number of these areas – including your site accessibility, your page loading speed, your website copy and content, and how visitors interact with your site. In fact, if you dive into each of these components of SEO performance, you could find a connection to audio transcripts in each facet.

Page Loading Speed

The use of videos on your site can negatively impact page load times, even while boosting engagement and conversions. This is due to increased bandwidth requirements, video optimization failure, and how many different “elements” you include on each page. To ensure optimal page loading times it’s imperative that you have correct transcriptions of your media files and that you make sure your videos are correctly formatted on your site.

Site Content and Copy

Your audio and video transcripts offer you ready-made text that you can include on your web pages – either as a direct copy and paste of the transcript or by being repurposed into new content. This could be a new asset like an eBook, a blog, a checklist, and many other items. This circles back to your SEO, as well, by providing more content on your website on a given topic, thus increasing the number of important keywords being used.

Correct Coding

Your website must be coded properly with page titles, H1, and H2 tags, metadata, image alt tags, and others. All cielo24 transcripts come with a list of keywords that you can then use to optimize your site coding.

Visitor Interaction

Including video on your website pages – especially captioned videos – has been shown to provide up to 85% more conversions than pages without videos. Search engines look at things like dwell times, click-thru rates, and bounce rates to calculate your SEO ranking.

How High Accuracy Accessible Transcripts Boost SEO

Let’s now consider the role that high accuracy transcripts – aka ones that cut the mustard for website accessibility – play in your SEO performance.

When it comes to audio transcription, there are two primary means of outsourcing this task – machine transcription (sometimes known as Automatic Speech Recognition or ASR) and human-verified transcription.

Many people choose to start with machine transcriptions because of their significantly reduced price and extremely fast turnaround times. But the lack of high accuracy with machine transcription can impact the strength of your SEO. Machine transcription doesn’t do much to help increase your SEO performance due to unavoidable inaccuracies made by the machines – missed or misunderstood words that can skew keywords and make your content readability less than desirable without manual editing.

Because of these errors, ASR auto-captions do not meet federal requirements for accessibility – which state the text must recreate the auditory experience of the unimpaired viewer or listener. You need highly accurate  searchable transcripts and captionsif you are subject to ADA compliance or interested in reaching your hearing-impaired audience.

Searchable Transcripts: The Icing on Your Cake

One feature that cielo24 offers all Enterprise customers is a searchable media library or searchable transcripts. We store all your media transcriptions in your personal dashboard and allow you to easily search every transcript in your account.

This allows you to improve your SEO in a number of ways, as well as simultaneously improving your accessibility. For example, you can…

1. Search for topics that are covered through many media files and more easily create new, highly accurate content for your website (or course lectures, as another example).
2. Create a comprehensive, topic-based online library that is both accessible and SEO friendly.
3. Find all media content on a given topic and include those files in online databases, both new and archival.

cielo24 Solutions for Captions and Searchable Transcripts

Our Enterprise-level accounts help companies comply with WCAG standards and are built around your specific video needs. They come with the help of an account executive, as well as opening you up to our full suite of features like 16+ foreign language translations, advanced media data, and our video wrapper.

Our Self Serve web app allows you to get started ordering video transcripts and captions immediately, without the wait for contracts or quotes. All new users are given one free mechanical transcription, and can then order more machine or human-verified captions and transcripts for less than a dollar per minute.

For more information on our video transcription, captioning and video intelligence solutions, contact us online or call us at 1-855-243-5624.

cielo24 is removing barriers to increase video marketing ROI, searchability and compliance for all your videos!

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