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Video Transcription: Rank Higher on YouTube

As of September 2017, YouTube is the second most visited website on the Internet, worldwide. That means there are a staggering number of users watching videos, which represents a fantastic opportunity for anyone trying to get in front of potential customers!

Once you create a video and upload it to your channel, how do you optimize it to rank higher in search results? CastingWords has some tricks that can help boost your video’s ranking in both YouTube and search engine results.

video being filmed

Get the most out of your video transcription

YouTube allows channel owners to upload text with each video, as a service to those viewers who are hard of hearing. After your video is uploaded, YouTube lets you insert text at different points to create language subtitles or closed captions.

This is where CastingWords can save you a lot of time and headaches.

If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video with closed captioning, you have noticed that, more often than not, the YouTube transcription is inaccurate. In many cases, the auto-generated text bears only a passing resemblance to what was actually said!

When you submit your video to CastingWords, your transcript goes through an exclusive multi-step quality assurance process, so you can rest easy knowing our team of human transcribers – not computers – will provide you with the most accurate possible transcript for your youtube video.

You can follow your order’s progress with our live order tracking system, which allows you to stay on top of your project in real-time.

Once you receive your transcript, just copy and paste the text into YouTube’s closed captioning section and let YouTube do the work of matching the text to the audio.

Your YouTube transcript’s impact on your SEO

woman watching video with transcription

When you upload your YouTube video transcript, it accomplishes a number of important things in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

First, by providing a complete readout of the contents, your transcript tells the system the exact nature of your video. This gives YouTube’s search algorithm information far beyond what most videos provide, which in most cases is limited to a title, a description, and perhaps a couple of tags.

When you upload a transcript and allow YouTube to create closed captioning for your video, the search algorithm no longer has to rely on your written description alone, and this makes a huge difference in ranking your video higher in search results.

Transcribing your video also helps you rank higher in Google’s search results. Since Google purchased YouTube in 2006, you may have noticed the weight that Google’s search algorithm places on YouTube videos keeps going up. Google wants to encourage people to upload more content to its own website, after all!

When your YouTube video includes an accurate transcript, that data can be read by Google’s search algorithm as well. This data-sharing relationship between Google and YouTube helps your videos rank better when users are looking for terms and keywords contained in your video.

Write a detailed video description

Video transcription can also help you rank higher on both YouTube itself and external search engines, by enabling you to create a much more effective video description. YouTube gives you a whopping 5,000 characters to fill into the description space, and sadly few channel owners take advantage of it.

You want your description to be catchy and have a compelling call-to-action on the first couple of lines, since that’s what your viewer is going to see. Be sure to include a link with your call-to-action, in case some users want to skip watching the video completely, and go straight to what you’re offering!

And here’s the other trick: After writing your attention-grabbing introduction in the description, you want to use the rest of the space to copy and paste part of your transcript.

Choose a section from the most keyword-rich portion of your recording. Write a short lead-in to the transcript excerpt, saying something like, “In this video, you’ll hear some of the following:” Then, paste a chunk right out of your transcript; one that includes common search terms related to your topic.

The transcribed text you add into the description will help get your video ranking higher on both YouTube and Google by offering more contextual terms and once again reinforcing your keywords.

Use an accurate video transcription service

It’s embarrassing when a video has a terrible transcription! If you take a look at YouTube and try the closed captioning feature on some videos, you’ll see the handiwork of a few of our competitors. It’s not pretty.

Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about that because CastingWords thrives in the realm of video transcription. Our team works tirelessly to make sure that we complete your work in a timely and accurate manner. We know that our work doesn’t only reflect upon our reputation, but yours as well!