You can make videos searchable on the web by including a transcript with it. A transcript improves accessibility, understanding, and user experience. It also improves search engine optimization (SEO), so search engines can crawl the full text of your video. Beyond SEO, you can repurpose your transcript into other content, including blog posts, guides, emails, ebooks, and social media posts.

Why not just rely on the auto-generated transcript?

If you look closely at an auto-generated transcript, like the one that YouTube generates, you’ll notice that it omits and misunderstands words. For example, depending on your topic, it might transcribe “UI” for “Universal Artificial Intelligence” or it might spell your company name wrong. Also, it can’t identify proper nouns and spell out acronyms, the beginning and ends of sentences, or who is speaking and when.

What’s the best way to go about getting a transcription?

You can take on transcriptions yourself, but you might find it takes more time than it’s worth. It’s best to seek an experienced transcriptionist with bonus skills as a writer and editor.

To start, your transcriptionist will work with you to get a rough version of the audio text, either from YouTube or a tool like Otter AI. Using a combination of tools, the transcriptionist can remove timestamps, fix bad line breaks, create shorter logical paragraphs, and add section headers in longer transcripts to make them easier to understand and follow the discussion. Plus, the transcriptionist can identify who is speaking and when.

From there, the transcriptionist puts their editor and writer hat on to review the rough transcript and video at a slower speed to correlate the spoken words to the transcript, noting any corrections along the way. They’ll not areas that require further evaluation from you to clarify terms, concepts, and names.

How long does transcribing a video take?

It depends. Transcribing, formatting, and proofing a 1-2 minute video and can take about 10 minutes–or 20 minutes if no script is available. A one-hour interview can take about 4 hours or longer if multiple people, say 4 or more, speak during the video.