Most people know transcripts as they relate to online video as “closed captioning.” Video transcripts are a great way to provide viewers with an enhanced way to engage with your video content. There are valuable reasons why you should consider transcripts for all your videos. Video transcription is important for video SEO and some organizations require them for ADA compliance.Here are a few reasons why video transcripts are necessary for your online video strategy even if you have no compliance needs.
Enable viewers in other languages to consume your videos
Even if your primary audience speaks English, there’s no reason not to expand content into other languages. Producing videos in multiple languages through dubbing practices is expensive, transcriptions make it very easy to translate videos and provide transcripts and closed captioning in multiple languages at very little cost. As a result your audience will be able to watch videos captioned in their native language, expanding your reach and increasing good will with your new international content.
Educate your audience quicker and more effectively
For complex topics and training videos, just watching a video is not enough for everyone, so, video subtitles enables your audience to read along with the video. A lot of people prefer to read along with videos because it helps them better consume and retain the ideas presented in the video.
Searchability
Websites that have a mix of different content types and a lot of it require robust search to create a good user experience. Traditionally video has been included in most site search results, but meta data tied to video assets has been limited to video title and description. With video transcripts, you can search for the correct video without having to guess the title or meta data because you have all of the content to examine. With video transcripts, searching for a video is as easy as searching for a blog post.
