Video SEO: Should I add Video Transcriptions to You Tube Videos Even with Google CC?

[BlairKuhnen]

So, You Tube allows plenty of room from descriptions.  I think 5,000 characters.  Google does a poor Closed Caption of our audio.  Should I also be adding accurate transcriptions to the description field in YouTube to help my Video SEO.

What are the pro's cons and is it worth doing?

[PhilNottingham]

Quite.

However, they don't use the machine generated transcriptions to rank your videos yet. i don't think it was the intention of Jeff to suggest that, but It's a bit of a misnomer. They currently onyl regularly index the one's you upload (because they're deemed as more accurate).

[BlairKuhnen]

One of my analysts found this form a WBF in Ausgust:

“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.”

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/youtube-ranking-factors-whiteboard-friday

[PhilNottingham]

I think they'll eventually get to the point where the auto-generated transcriptions are also indexed, but currently the transcription quality just isn't quite accurate enough across the board to make that possible.

[BlairKuhnen]

Phil,

Thanks.  You were the first to point out the defining reason for transcription: "YouTube's machine generated transcriptions don't get indexed, but transcripts you upload will."

That's really what was not clear to me.  I guess if I were Google and owned YouTube, I would to index CC, but I am not.

At least for now it seems transcription is well worth the effort.

[PhilNottingham]

Yes. YouTube's machine generated transcriptions don't get indexed, but transcripts you upload will. This will then allow your YouTube videos to rank for long tail queries relevant to the text of your transcript (much like page copy). You can also "keyword stuff" your Transcriptions to optimise the video for certain keywords.

NOTE: You can and should keyword stuff in a Whitehat way, not just plough tons of versions of the keyword into the text at random points. What i mean by this is... for example, if you want to rank for the name of the actor performing in your video - then you could append "actor's name: " to any line that they speak. Additionally, you could add some descriptive text explaining what's going on - rather than just copying the recited text.

[BlairKuhnen]

We had recently tested them.  I think that will be our route.

[danatanseo]

SpeakerText is awesome. You will be in good hands. I wish we had the volume of videos to go enterprise with them because their Caption Box is wicked cool.

[BlairKuhnen]

thanks for the +1 vote on Dana's comments.  We did the first 80 videos transcribed via an elance contractor, but I think the service is probably the route to go.

[BlairKuhnen]

Thanks for the reply Dana.  I guess I was getting concerned over somehow the transcription being considered duplicate content.  You actually answered the better question of how should we deal with transcriptions in general.

With 700+ videos to transcribe, nice to get it right the first time.  The service we are considering is speakertext.com.  I believe they can automate the CC need.

[SorbetDigital]

I agree with Dana - there really aren't any negatives and a huge amount of positives to adding closed captions to YouTube videos. If you have any kind of narrative in your videos I can't think of a single reason why you shouldn't.

Also, take advantage of good (but still cost effective) transcription services and upload closed captions in as many other languages as you want/need to.

Carla

[danatanseo]

Yes. It is definitely worth doing. IMHO, there are absolutely no "cons" to adding transcriptions, especially good ones. You are right, the Google machine transcriptions are just plain horrible.

I wouldn't load the transcription into the description area on YouTube, because that's not really what that space is intended for. I would create a transcript, upload it to YouTube and then disable the machine transcription. There is one very compelling reason to do this. YouTube displays a "CC" for all videos that have been closed-captioned. People wanting to watch videos with captions (and that's not just hearing-impaired people, it can be people on mobile devices without headphones, or people at work without speakers on their computers), can search and sort by this parameter. This means if they are looking for a video on a particular topic and they need it to be closed-captioned and they sort by that, your videos will come up on the list. If you transcription is just in the description area, then your video wouldn't come up as having captions available.

I use http://www.dotsub.com to create timed captions for all of my company's videos. They provide a wonderful, easy-to-use and free tool that does a splendid job. Exporting your transcript and uploading them to YouTube is a piece of cake.

There are of course services that you can pay to do it for you too, and they tend to be fairly inexpensive.

Once uploaded, your close-caption file content is 100% indexable content to search engines. It isn't hidden in a iframe or anything like that. The only downside is the same downside you face interms of SEO by hosting your videos on YouTube instead of a 3rd party like Wistia. YouTube will always outrank you for your own content. When your videos get ranked in Google, they will link back 99% of the time to YouTUbe and not to your Website, no matter what you do...transcription or no transcription.

Bottom line is those transcriptions can only help you. They cannot hurt you.

I hope that's helpful!

Dana