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
-
301 redirects and impact on page authority
I need to restructure a section of my website, changing some page titles and moving some pages to other sections. This will then change the URLs but the CMS I use will automatically create 301 redirects so the old URLs still work. The question is, will this have any negative impacts on page authority/page rank? From what I've read, it seems having 301's used to have a negative impact but doesn't anymore?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
How Much Domain Age Matter In Ranking?
I am very confused about domain age. I read many articles about domain age, some experts say domain age does matter in ranking and some experts say it doesn't matter in the ranking. Kindly guide me about domain age.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
Impact of Removing 60,000 Page from Sites
We currently have a database of content across about 100 sites. All of this content is exactly the same on all of them, and it is also found all over the internet in other places. So it's not unique at all and it brings in almost no organic traffic. I want to remove this bloat from our sites. Problem is that this database accounts for almost 60,000 pages on each site and it is all currently indexed. I'm a little bit worried that flat out dumping all of this data at once is going to cause Google to wonder what in the world we are doing and we are going to see some issues from it (at least in the short run). My thought now is to remove this content in stages so it doesn't all get dropped at once. But would deindexing all of this content first be better? That way Google would still be able to crawl it and understand that it is not relevant user content and therefore minimize impact when we do terminate it completely? Any other ideas for minimizing SEO issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Negative SEO impact of two Similar Domains on Same IP
Our ecommerce company has acquired a former competitor which has similar content & largely sells the same set of products. Both domains run on the same ecommerce platform version and do well organically on an overlapping set of keywords. Currently the websites are separate instances which are hosted separately. There is no interlinking or cross branding between the sites. Since each brand has strong equity & SEO, there are no plans to combine brands or domains. For several reasons, it would be ideal to combine platform instances and hosting, but we are concerned about potential SEO impact of shared IP addresses. Is it likely that moving the sites to the same IP/C-Block could have a negative SEO impact since they rank on the same keywords. Would Google devalue one site if they were seen to be connected or owned by the same company? I know this issue has been addressed for domains with more variance between products and content, but since there is a large overlap (but not duplicate content) between our two domains, we wanted additional insight. Obviously there are other SEO factors when you move a site, but we are currently trying to understand this specific factor. Thanks Community for your help! -Amber
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmberHanson0 -
How long until I see an SEO impact from newly optimized site
We just recently launched a new version of our website. This new version allowed us to integrate research into technical SEO updates to enhance our search visibility. Based on experience from those viewing this post, what is a good average timeframe in which I should start seeing some effects from these changes in Google? I know this question is hard to answer because of all the variables that are part of the answer but I need something to take to the c-level as an estimate of what to expect. I figured experience might tell a good story here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
Schema.org and YouTube Videos
Hi, Does anyone know how to implement schema.org markup with YouTube embedded videos? Thanks Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Updating Youtube Videos
My company has a popular Youtube channel. Some of the videos are old, and lower quality than the new HD videos we host on our site. We'd like to get the new, better videos on Youtube, but we don't want to erase the viewcounts and comments of the old videos. We also don't want a duplicate content penalty, if that exists on Youtube. What should we do? We could: 1. Overwrite our old videos with the new ones, and lose the view counts 2. Add the new videos, and leave the old videos untouched 3. Add the new videos, and add some kind of redirect from the old videos 4. Do nothing. We want to embed the new videos on our site to increase our Youtube view counts, so options 1-3 are preferable. Has anyone faced a similar situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Can converting a site to HTTPS impact ranking?
We have a client with a very large site that would like to put a login on each page; however, that would require the entire site be put behind a secure connection (changing http:// to https:// on every page). They rank for a ton of keywords and rank well. Would the change impact their rankings at all? Could it possibly help them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dknewmedia0