I get this question a lot on social media and during discovery calls with potential clients. There are a lot of opinions out there and I would like to give you mine.
There’s really no right and wrong answer here, but I’m going to give you the pros and cons so that you can decide for yourself if you could apply this to your podcast. Again, as I’ve mentioned in my last episode, listen to your gut and own your decisions.
What Is A Transcript? What Are The Pros & Cons?
A transcript is a word per word of your podcast episode. And the reason why some podcasters post transcripts of their episode is because of the text. Google and other search engines will then know what the episode is about. However, if we’re talking about Google and search engine optimization, one thing that is really important is to tell Google what is important in your episode and what is not important. And you do that through titles and headings. The keywords there are picked up by Google making it easier for people to find your content.
Another thing you can do is create a blog post. The reasons are Google knows what you’re talking about and you can tick all the SEO boxes. Also, from a reader’s perspective, a transcript is usually not the easiest to read. On the other hand, a blog post is usually easier to scan through. And it is easier to just read as a piece of content on its own without listening to the audio.
There are also pros for transcripts. It gives better accessibility for your podcast. This is especially important for people who cannot hear or cannot hear well. This way, they can still get to your content by reading it. Unlike blog posts where you only read the important parts of the episode and not the full content. But for some, blog posts might seem better in terms of accessibility because it’s easier to read. So it really depends on how you want your podcast to appear, and just consider all the pros and cons.
Other Things To Consider
Time is something we also have to think about. You have to think about how much time does it cost you to create a good transcript versus a good blog post. Even if you outsource it, think about what has the most benefits, the ideal situation, what would it cost time-wise compared to doing it yourself. As an example, we at The Podcast Babes use Otter.ai for transcription. We upload the audio and it automatically generates a transcript for the episode. It’s awesome but it’s also not perfect. There are quite a few mistakes and it also depends if the person talking has an accent. What we do for our blog post is we go through our transcript, we don’t make any changes, but we highlight some important things. And we actually copy important sentences to a Google Doc. And we use that to write a blog post. So we still use the transcript but we just make it for the reader easier to read and understand.
It Still Your Decision
So for transcripts, it has pros and cons. There’s not really a right or wrong here. It is really up to you, your brand, your style of the podcast, whatever is important to you. It’s either you create a blog post, or if you can use both. You could do a blog post and then add a PDF file with the full transcript. That is definitely more work because you would have to clean up the transcript and write a blog post., but that would work too if that’s what you prefer.
Again, weigh your pros and cons. Know what’s best for you, follow your instinct, and own your decisions.
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