How much impact do Youtube transcripts have?
-
We're considering transcribing our videos. It's a significant enough expense that we have to be sure of the impact.
1. How much effect do the transcripts have on Youtube SEO rankings?
2. Should we also post the transcripts beneath the video, or is uploading them sufficient? If we didn't post the transcripts, we'd just write custom keyword rich text for each video. We could post both keyword text and transcript text, but that may be too wordy.
Does anyone have experience on how much Youtube transcripts impact rankings? Thanks
-
Transcriptions definitely have impact on your rankings in Youtube.
The purpose of the search is to deliver the closest options to the viewer as possible so if they find a match in the actual content of the video, it will be ranked better than a video that doesn't have the content matched. The transcribing function offered by Youtube is not perfect - it does a poor enough job at the moment that transcribing them yourself and uploading the file is worth the time.
-
Hi Blake,
You can see in this whiteboard friday "Youtube Ranking Factors" that the transcription is a ranking factor
The segment of the video in question :
The fourth YouTube ranking factor on the content side is transcription. This is something that most people don't know about. I'm going to tell you about it today. That is that YouTube has a feature where it's going to try to transcribe your video for you, and it is horrible at transcribing your video. If you've ever tried to read the transcription that it does by machine, it is awful. However, something else that they don't tell you is that they use those transcriptions to rank your video for keywords.
So, if you were to slip something, and there's actually been some tests done on this, where someone transcribes a video and throws in a word that isn't mentioned anywhere in the description, anywhere in the title, and then you type that in a search in YouTube and up comes that video. They are indexing the transcriptions. So take the time to go ahead and transcribe your video word for word. Upload the text file. It will match up the words. It will then make your video closed caption, which will increase your click through rate, and it will also allow you to rank better for that video. Just a quick tip on that. Definitely worth doing. If you're going to take all the time to make the video, take a few extra minutes and transcribe it and make it happen.
Hope it can help !
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Too much content??
Hey Moz comm! My company is migrating all of our content manually from several subdomains into one new, unified subdomain next week. We will be uploading content at the rate of 15 blog posts/day or 75 posts/week--is it possible that we can get flagged by google for this, or is it always good to be adding lots of content? It's all quality stuff, but would they think we're spamming? Just wondering, curious to hear any insights or recommendations, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | genevieveagar0 -
Can you combine YouTube and on-site hosting as part of a Video SEO strategy?
My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos. We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me. As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced. From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea? 3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description. The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order: the original post on Moz a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input: Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube? Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search? Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
SEO impact when micro site are hosted on third party url
Have a look at this url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kjerstibakke
http://www.bekkevold-as.no/.
On the front page they are providing links to a website created by one of their suppliers. (Three cirkle icons in the middle of the page).
The links make the customers leave the site and open on a different domain, even the branding of the page is for Bekkevold Elektro (see log top right)
The question from me: How will this impact the SEO for Bekkevold Elektro. Would it be better to create a subdomain for Bekkevold Elektro and ask the supplier to point to this? Or is it ok to leave it as it is, having links back to the web site for Bekkevold Elektro? Just changing the target of the link to open in a new window.
Thank you very much for your support on this. I would appreciate any suggestion for improvement for my customer, Bekkevold Elektro. Best regards
Kjersti Bakke0 -
Desktop vs. Mobile Website - ranking impact
Working on develop mobile pages using dynamic serving method, we are planing on only develop number of important pages (not the whole site) to be mobile friendly. To keep the consistency of the user experience, the new mobile site will only have internal links to pages that are mobile friend. Questions: If an existing non-mobile page ranking #1 on mobile SERP today, this page will not have a mobile friendly version, and will not link in the mobilefriendly site. will there be any impact to the ranking. Assuming: When Google mobile/Smartphone bots will not see a link to this page. The page will still accessible to Google desktop bots.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomchu0 -
Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file - will that have an impact on the way our site is crawled?
Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file. All of their sitemap links are on a different domain and I'm wondering if this will have any impact on our searchability or potential rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tsmith1310 -
Recommendations for the length of h1 tags and how much does it matter. What is the major disadvantage if the h1 tags are slightly longer.
recommendations for the length of h1 tags and how much does it matter. What is the major disadvantage if the h1 tags are slightly longer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MariaMcGrath0 -
Impact of May 2015 quality update and July Panda update on specialty brands or niche retail
We are seeing the following trend in our rankings and traffic after the recent Google algorithm updates (May 2015 quality/phantom, and July 2015 Panda), and I am curious if anyone here has encountered similar and/or has any good ideas on how to react. Background - we operate in a niche segment, but compete for keywords with large home improvement stores and mass retailers. In the past, prior to May 2015, we generally ranked higher than the large home improvement stores and mass retailers for our key specific terms in our niche. We believed that it was because we have a very specialized focus and so our store was highly relevant for someone searching in that niche (for example for the name of the product category as a keyword). In general, we ranked #1-3. Along with a few of our competitors in our niche. And then would be the big box home improvement stores in spots 5-10. The change we saw starting in May is that now all the home improvement stores and also a few large multi-category retailers took over those top 5 spots and bumped all the specialty retailers and the specialty brand manufacturers (like us) down. Our direct competitors in our niche all seem to have been impacted pretty much the same as us. So, in summary it seems like these latest updates may have favored the more general retailers but with stronger domain authority than the more specific but smaller retailers. Hard to know for sure, but this is the trend we believe we see. So, that said, what are some good strategies to respond to this situation? We can't really compete on overall domain authority with these huge retailers. And our previously successful strategy of having a very focused niche, with lots of helpful content, videos, instructional guides, etc. no longer seems to be enough. Has anyone else seen similar results since this past May? Where specialty retail or brand sites lost ground to larger general retailers? And if so, has anyone found any good strategies to gain back their previous rankings, or at least partially?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewk1 -
Exit Popups Impact On SEO
Hi looking for any research on the impact of using exit popups (when a visitor is exiting the site), and the impact on it from SEO perspective. Regards, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0