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
-
Redirect inbound links to youtube?
I have a website that's been going for 10 years or so, doesn't get huge traffic but it's fairly consistent. About 5 years ago I put the same content on youtube- instructional how to videos. The website offers slightly better content because there are images to accompany the step by step text below the videos. The text is more or less the same on youtube and my website. Recently, youtube has started to vastly out-perform my website. For every page/video on my website, there is a youtube page. They're basically competing against each other. Over the years I have accrued a fair number of links to my website. My question is, should I redirect my inbound links to the relevant youtube pages and sacrifice my website? Thanks! Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madegood0 -
Ecommerce replatforming and redirects - how much traffic will I lose?
Hey there,I'm looking to hear your experiences in regards to replatforming an ecommerce store and SEO impacts.My company is analyzing the impacts of switching from Magento Entreprise to Shopify Plus. Some background info : 900k sessions / month 52% of sessions coming from SEO Multilingual store : half of traffic is French, half is English 945 domains linking to us, according to search console Competitive industry (retail) Moving to Shopify would force us to do two things: Redirect all category pages, brand pages and product pages. Shopify forces a specific URL structure for these pages that is different from our current one. Redirect the English section of the site to a subdomain (https://en.example.com/...). Have multiple stores on Shopify can't be done on the same domain. I'm especially afraid of the impact of moving the English section to a subdomain. I feel it would lose most of the domain authority - most backlinks go to the website root so very few will be redirected to the subdomain.Even if we spend a lot of time doing redirections, do you think the traffic will significantly suffer? Do you have stats to share on a similar migration you would have done, or other insights?Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cheebee1540 -
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 -
Social Impacts on SEO? How to Do this?
I'm new in SEO and heard by one of my friend that social signals are important for SEO of a website. If people have shared a website's url on their twitter, then it will automatically get rank in google. Is that true and how google sees this social sharing? and how can I do this for my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
YouTube hosting question
The "How it works" video that is embedded on my sites homepage is currently linked to an individual YouTube account not our company account. I would like to change the ownership so that the company profile can enjoy the added views (currently 13K +). Is there a way to move the video to a different account without losing the views it has already accumulated? Also, a related technical question - our R&D team says the video is slowing down the site. It links to YouTube but there is nothing in the source of our page about YouTube. Any suggestions for embedding it more effectively?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Embed hosted videos or Youtube videos on site
Youtube is our major source of traffic. We also have many of the same videos on our own site, self-hosted. They use the same video player as our paid video course, which allows the user to increase or decrease speed. We're debating whether to replace these self-hosted videos with youtube embeds. Pros: Increase Youtube viewcounts More engagement with videos (videos suggested at end of youtube videos are almost all our own) Cons Possible outbound traffic to youtube. We can't showcase our video player's speed change function I'm not sure how embed views are taken into account by Youtube, and how big a factor outbound traffic is. Would you suggest swapping out our self-hosted videos for embeds? We want to maintain our Youtube channel's edge, and convince people to sign up for our course.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Do links to Blog articles help that much?
So here's my question/scenario.. When it comes to link-building, I'm noticing a trend that goes like this: If you have a website like www.insurancelondonontario.com and you want to rank highly for the target phrase 'insurance london ontario', you need to get links with that anchor-text pointing to the index page, which is the page you want to rank for that keyword. But what I'm noticing, is that a lot of link builders use a strategy where they create a good piece of content.. like "10 Ways to Decrease your Car Insurance Premiums" within the blog, and then build links to that article since it's easier as it's a good piece of content. My question is.. how much can this really help you to rank for 'insurance london ontario' if all your doing is building links to that blog article, and not the main page? I know it helps the overall domain authority, but is it enough to get you ranking for your goal phrase, or is it just a supporting method?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Performing Internal Optimization Without Much Anchor Text?
Hi guys. We're in the process of building a new site, and are using a lot of icon based linking, image linking, etc. There is some basic text linking here and there, but not a whole lot. My concern is, because I'm not using actual anchor text, but just images, that crawlers are going to have a more difficult time determining what pages are about. Do I have a valid concern, or am I just worrying about nothing? If this concern is valid, what is the best way to remedy this concern? Alt img tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0