I've mentioned before that YouTube is great for increasing your website traffic. There's no denying video marketing is powerful, in this article I'm going to share tips on how to use transcripts to grow your website traffic, and the tools that will help you!
The Power of Video Marketing - The Research
- Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text. (Insivia)
- Video increases organic search traffic on a website by whopping 157%. (Conversion XL)
- Video marketers gain 66% better qualified leads (per year) (Optinmonster)
Videos are great for building rapport, as well as increasing your visibility.
How do you get that increase in organic search traffic?
Research shows that 85% of video on Facebook is watched in silence. This means the video is captioned, or contains text so the viewer can consume the content with ease.
But... Not everyone loves video. People read faster than they watch. Why waste 15 minutes watching a video when you can read it in 3 minutes? This is where the transcript swings into action. When you transcribe your videos you have the video content AND the text. It means your audience doesn't miss out, and it increases the time they spend on your website. In other words, it's having your video cake and eating it!
What is a Video Transcript?
A video transcript is all the words spoken in your video, in text format. Your transcriber takes your video, and created a document of all the words spoken in the video. Your transcript is that document, and it's what you'd paste into the blog post with your video.
It's not just videos that benefit from transcribing, if you podcast you can have the audio transcribed and use them as show notes (with a little bit of editing).
How a transcript benefits your audience
Designrr says it best here:
Video marketing is growing. 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool — up from 63% over the last year. (Hubspot). And by 2021, Cisco says, video will represent 82% of all internet traffic.
Take a step back and let’s really look at the numbers, feels like there’s something missing here.
Oh yes! let’s not forget the others…
72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video. (HubSpot) What about the 28%?
59% of executives say they would rather watch a video than reading text. (Wordstream). What about the 41%?
65% of people use YouTube to help them solve a problem. (Google) That’s 35% of the people being left out.
Do you see where I am going with this? If video marketing is the way to go, what about voice search?
65% of 25-49-year-olds speak to their voice-enabled devices at least once per day (PwC).
Half of all online searches will be voice searches by 2020. (ComScore). That’s half of 3.5 billion of Google searches which are made every day. (Internet Live Stats).
As you can see, by not having a transcript available you're leaving out a huge chunk of your audience, and their needs are going to be met by other website owners.
4 ways Transcripts drive traffic to your website!
- You can take soundbites from the transcript and turn them into social posts, linking back to your post containing the video.
- You can use them as email content to drive traffic back to your posts
- You can even expand on them to make a mini-guide.
- If you like creating, you can take the video transcript and turn it into a worksheet and create a Content Upgrade...
There's so many things you can do with a transcript! They're the gift that just keeps on giving...
Types of Video Transcription
There are two main types of transcription. I'm going to show my age here, and mention shorthand... Shorthand is how things used to be transcribed. Straight from the bosses mouth, to their assistant and they filled up a notepad with squiggles that only they (seemingly) could decipher. This was a highly sought after skill, and the more words per minute shorthand you could do, the more you would be paid.
The good news is, you don't need a Shorthand expert or an audio typist to transcribe for you any more - you can have a machine do it instead. These are not 100% accurate, but they're fast (I've transcribed 30 minute videos in less than 5 minutes) and they are far cheaper than a human being.
So, the two types of video transcription are human transcribing and AI, or machine transcription.
Where Can You Get Your Videos Transcribed
There are a lot, I mean a LOT of places you can get your videos transcribed. One of my fave places for finding tools to help grow my business is Appsumo. Not only am I a proud partner who recommends their products, I also sell one of my online courses in their marketplace.
I recommend you take a look at their YouTube starter collection, and see what tools they have. I like the look of YouPost for transcribing videos, hop on over and take a look yourself.
With YouPost you get:
- Fast video-to-article conversion
- Not only text but also pictures from the video
- SEO-friendly articles ready to be edited
- Several seconds spent on each video
- Unlimited conversions
Getting the Best video transcription
I mentioned above that transcripts aren't 100% accurate. Whether you have a human transcribe or AI, there will be the odd mistake. Your machine transcriber or human being may mis-hear a word, you may have an accent or you say a word that the transcriber doesn't understand. Everyone knows that I speak like the Queen of England, yet it always transcribes percy instead of per se.
To get the best video transcript, go through your videos and check the quality of the audio, and your speaking. If your video's audio isn't clear, or you don't speak clearly and concisely, then you won't get a good transcript. Put these videos to one side for now, and focus on transcribing your best work.
Make sure you go through your transcript and check for obvious errors. Most transcription tools don't know nouns, and won't capitalise them, others give you the content in all lower case. If you don't have time to edit your transcripts, this is a job for a virtual assistant.
Alternatives to Video Transcription
If you've not started yet with video, but love how powerful transcripts will be in your content creation journey, then think about video scripts. If you write your script out before you record your video you can use a teleprompter. This means your video script is also your transcript. I like to do it this way as it eliminates a lot of umms, arrrs and other verbal ticks like starting every sentence with the word "So..." or "And".
Writing a script for your video also means you can remember your calls to action! This means your videos will convert better instead of you just staring at the screen like a deer in the headlights.
The teleprompter tool that I love is called BigVu. I picked this up from Appsumo in September 2020, and its also part of the YouTube starter collection.
The steps to using BigVu are simple:
- You install the app on your phone.
- Open BigVu on your desktop/laptop
- Add the script
- Open the app and your script is there!
- You can record your video in the app, with the words on the screen.
Your eyes are always in the right place, and you don't have to worry about remembering everything you want to say!
As you can see, there are many benefits to transcribing your videos and adding that content to your website. Not only does it increase your website traffic, it increases your audience size as you're more inclusive.
Pros & Cons of Transcribing Videos for Website traffic
Pros:
Cons:
Conclusion:
If you're not adding transcripts to your video content, then you're missing out, and so are your potential customers; they're missing out on doing business with you. The tools to make this easy can be picked up on Appsumo, so there's no excuses for not having more traffic to your website!