If you’ve been listening to me or watching me over this past year, there’s probably one thing that I’ve drilled into you almost as much as content marketing itself, and that is: Search engines know nothing about videos, they’re not transcribing the text.
So when you do a video, the search engines do not automatically transcribe the text to get the video higher in the search engines, it just doesn’t happen.
There are people that have sent me information that said that if you take a YouTube video and embed it on your website, Google put that page higher in the search engines. That’s not necessarily true.
I’ve done that, and there have been times where it has gone higher. There have also been times where it’s gone lower and times where it’s done nothing.
Someone actually said that they did it and it worked for them. That is awesome, I’m glad that it worked for them. And it did work for us sometimes, but sometimes it didn’t. So, you really can’t count on videos working for search engine optimization.
However, people love videos, so do your webinars, do your videos, but transcribe them. When you do your webinar and you do the video on the webinar, transcribe it into the webinar text. That way you can even use the text as marketing material when you want to promote the webinar.
And for videos, I’m doing a video right now. This video is going out on YouTube. So I’m doing my podcast and I’m doing what they call a vlog now, a video log (or whatever they’re going to call it these days, they’re going to figure some new name out).
But even when I do this, I transcribe it and put the transcription into the description for YouTube because that’s how YouTube is going to tell people about this video. And of course, you’re reading the transcription of the podcast right here as well.
SEO is to get your information in front of people and videos help to do that because people love to watch videos. So do your videos, but make sure just transcribe them.
And be careful with the transcription services, they are not 100% accurate. I’d say they are about 70% accurate for my stuff.
But here’s the big thing with transcribing videos: How people talk is not how people write (for instance, this entire paragraph isn’t in the podcast because I forgot to say it). I change up to 30% of the text to make it easier for people to read, and you will need to do that also.
No only that, the transcription services mess up things like capitalization, putting periods and commas on the wrong spot, and they can be terrible with names.
Just in the last three transcriptions, my name has been put down as: Tie, Hi, Time, Thai, and even Tom once. But I’m sure you won’t have as many problems if your name is Mike or John.
One day, these transcription services will be a whole lot better and we won’t have to worry about this. But right now, when you transcribe it, you still have to go through it and manually make sure that everything’s done right.
Dr. Ty Belknap, Port Bell SEO
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