Transcripts Help Grow Your Podcast
I want you to imagine that you walk into a supermarket, but instead of seeing pretty well lit aisles and clearly marked sections where you defined your food, everything is covered in black curtain, and there are no signs. There's nothing to let you know where anything you're looking for is. You just need to kind of walk around in this poorly lit room searching for the groceries that you need to get.
That's kind of how it feels when a podcast doesn't have transcripts. There are a lot of reasons besides accessibility why a podcast needs to have transcripts. And frankly, anyone who tells you that their podcast wouldn't benefit from transcripts, they're full of it. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Welcome to Podcast Workflows where you get daily tips to improve your process, grow your show, and maybe even make some money. Each week, I also do a daily dive into the process of the world's most successful podcasters and reveal their tools, processes, and systems to help you simplify the production of your own show and reclaim hours in your day. You can improve your own podcast production process by seeing how the pros do it. I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And today, we're going to talk about why podcasts need transcripts, and further why transcripts help grow your podcasts?
Something that especially new podcasters are resistant to is transcripts. And for a while, it's been perfectly understandable why. The free cheap AI generated transcripts end up taking more work because they aren't accurate, and the human written ones cost a lot of money that many podcasters feel they don't have.
But a lot has changed in the last year. AI tools have gotten a lot better and produce a much more accurate transcripts. So it's a lot more affordable to create transcripts. But even so, I do to flee pay multiple people to transcribe my podcasts. Because if you want to grow your show, you need transcripts. Not only do they make your show more accessible to those who physically cannot listen or choose not to listen. Maybe they prefer to consume content by reading, but they also provide a more text and content for both Google and podcast apps to search. I'm not saying that this is improving SEO for your podcast, but it's giving your podcast more content to feed to search engines. And those transcripts make it a lot easier to repurpose content as well.
There are lots of tools out there like Castmagic and Capsho which will take a transcript and repurpose it. So with that in mind, let's look at the three reasons why your podcasts need transcripts. I've kind of already mentioned them, but:
One is accessibility. Deaf users will not be able to consume your podcast at all. Which means your excluding 13% of the US audience. And given that podcasts are a great way to establish trust, reaching as many people as possible within your target audience is a good deal. Not to mention that you could be legally at risk. I'm not a lawyer, but at the end of 2021, Sirius XM was sued by the national association for the deaf for potentially violating Americans, the Americans with disabilities act or the ADA.
Now, I don't want to use scare tactics here. And again, I'm not a lawyer, but given the ubiquity of affordable tools now, I think it would behoove you to have podcasts just for that reason alone.
But really number two is podcast Transcripts are convenient for all users. When you have a transcript, it's easier for users to skim text, or it's easier for people who have already listened to find quotes and topics they want to reread. Or there are some people who prefer to read the full episode. It's all about personal preference.
And number three, is that while I am not an SEO expert, Google and other search engines don't automatically transcribe an index audio yet. And anecdotally, one of the first times I saw big growth in my show, How I Built it was when I added transcripts.
But aside from anecdotes, according to Moz, after they added transcripts to their podcast, they saw a 15% increase in organic traffic to the website and a 50% increase to some keyword lift around the keywords that they were tracking. So again, that's according to Moz, which is a pretty big search engine company. So, maybe there is some evidence that transcripts can help SEO as well.
That's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I know there are a lot of opinions around transcripts, but these days with open AI, MacWhisper, Descript and Riverside, and even hosts like rss.com that are offering transcripts for free for their customers, there's no excuse to not have transcripts these days.
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Thanks so much for listening. And until next time. I can't wait to see what you make.
