At Bunny Studio, we’ve written at length about the importance of all sorts of transcriptions. Whether you want to improve SEO, increase across-the-board engagement, provide access for people with hearing disabilities, or all of the above, it’s an indispensable tool. But, not all transcriptions are created equal; today, we’ll learn about clean verbatim transcription, and what it can do for you.
But wait, what? Transcription? Like that thing that people do in courthouses and fancy-pants interviews? Well, it turns out that there’s much more to the world of transcription. In fact, there are plenty of benefits for augmenting your video marketing strategy with transcriptions. Whether you’re a social media tycoon, or simply trying to increase sales and revenue, transcriptions can do a lot more than you think.
Today, we’ll learn why clean verbatim transcription can:
- Help you increase your sales.
- Gain more viewership numbers and hook users who wouldn’t watch at all without a transcript.
- Increase your standing in search engines by a significant margin.
- Help you provide access for hard-of-hearing viewers.
- Significantly clean up chaotic, unintelligible, or unclear conversations.
So, ready to begin? First, let’s start with the basics.
What is Transcription?
Lately, we’ve been on a sort of transcription binge in Bunny Studio, and with good reason. In “All You Need to Know About Important Types of Transcription,” author James Young wrote:
This professional’s job is to document audio or video by listening to the speakers and converting what they said into written or electronic documents. This job requires serious training and extreme patience. The work of a transcriptionist can involve a myriad of topics, which include legal, medical, business, and many more.
So, the work of a transcriptionist mainly involves conversion from speech to text. But, not all transcription jobs are the same. While some involve working in high-demand, high-pressure environments, some are more of a cross between transcribing, captioning, and subtitling. While there’s a tendency to conflate these terms, they are more like close cousins than the same exact thing.
First, let’s take a look at the types of transcription and their uses, and we’ll see where clean verbatim transcription comes in.
Verbatim Transcription
This type is used when the transcriptionist has to take a complete word-for-word account of the spoken word, including imperfections. This includes all of the pauses, stammers, stutters, and all manner of non-verbal utterances, including filler words. While these don’t usually make for great captions, they are necessary for legal environments, for instance. Legal transcriptions are legally valid documents that can be taken as evidence; if a transcriptionist leaves anything out, they may be omitting important information that could make or break a court case.
While this type of transcription is the most authentic, it’s not the preferred one on YouTube or social media.
Clean Verbatim Transcription
Sometimes you need to cut straight through the filler and go to the meat of the issue. When you need to cut right to the heart of what the speaker is saying, clean verbatim transcription is what you’re after.
Rev.com states: Clean verbatim transcription means that your audio or video files have been lightly edited for easy readability. It’s still a precise transcript of what has been recorded except that all of the extra distractions have been removed. There is never any paraphrasing; clean verbatim transcription is exactly what has been said, but cleaned up for clarity.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean that the files themselves are edited. What it means is that these transcripts don’t contain run-on sentences, coughing, stutters, word repetition, filler words, and the like. It’s a way to get the exact meaning of what is being said across while presenting it in a tidier, more compact manner.
This is the type of transcription preferred by most of our clients. Whether you’re on social media, your own site, or on streaming platforms, meaning often trumps 100% authenticity. Unless you want to include some filler for effect, this is the easiest, clearest, and most direct type of transcription. It also has the added benefit of maximizing engagement — after all, who wants to read through endless “umms” and “ahs” while trying to understand a complex subject?
“Intelligent” Transcription
Now, mind you, this is not a patch on other types of transcription. Intelligent transcription simply means that this is a more deeply edited version of a transcript. This is not so much something that belongs in the realm of video, but text. As it stands, intelligent transcription endeavors to transform the spoken word into a readable text. Thus, you won’t typically see this transcription in videos, as you would subtitles or captions.
Some people just don’t have time to read a full transcript or watch a video. When that’s the case, you may need to use intelligent transcription to create a shorter, more compact edit.
Clean Verbatim Transcription, Subtitles, and Captions
So, now we know what clean verbatim transcription is. As I mentioned above, there’s a significant overlap between subtitles, transcriptions, and captions. It may turn out that you have to use the same person to provide all three, so listen up:
Transcription is the act of word-by-word conversion of speech to text; subtitles are captions that convey the dialogue in an audiovisual production; closed captions are often used interchangeably with subtitles, but often include information — like text explanations of sounds and music — for hearing-impaired people.
This is a snippet of our article “Best Transcription Services.” The best around tend to use these terms closely, and they will also provide services that tend to synthesize all three, depending on your needs. You’ll need a workable transcript to create captions and subtitles, and sometimes you may even need a translator to come into the picture. Hey, after all, the more languages that come into the picture, the better!
Clean Verbatim Transcription: Clear Benefits
So, what do you stand to gain by adding clean verbatim transcription and captions to your videos? Quite a lot, apparently. The first is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Nowadays, everything about business or marketing success hinges on people actually finding you. And that means being on the first — or at most, second — page of search engine queries.
More than that, you want people to find you for terms that are actually related to whatever you’re selling or wanting to show them. Sure, it’s all well and good if they find your indie film when looking for dog brushes, but it probably won’t do you much good. Unless you made a sequel to Marley & Me with an ending that’s not an absolute heart-breaker, in which case, thank you.
So, on to the benefits:
Google Indexing for SEO
Google doesn’t index videos or audio files, because it can’t fully understand their content. You may get the description and byline in the index, but that’s it. A full clean verbatim transcription sidesteps this problem, and delivers a double whammy: you can provide your viewers with a full caption as well as give Google something to truly sink its teeth into.
If you have your videos on the Google Index, then it’s much more likely that your potential users (and buyers) will find you. What’s more, it’s probably going to net you more sales to boot! In a previous Bunny Article we said: “If you’re reading this, it’s very likely you’re running a business or trying to get a startup off the ground. Perhaps it’ll interest you to know that pages with transcriptions make an average of 16% more than their counterparts.”
So, people find you more, and you sell more. That’s a win/win scenario if I’ve ever seen one.
It Increases Engagement
Most people watch videos all day, whether it’s on social media or streaming platforms. But, what we don’t do often is listen. What’s the difference? Well, to put it simply, videos clean verbatim transcripts and closed captions tend to draw more attention to themselves. Why? Because viewers can essentially preview the video without having to commit to listening to it. If they’re interested, they’ll click on the little speaker icon and watch it all the way through; if they’re not, they’ll continue scrolling until the next preview.
So, a transcript will not only allow you to be on Google’s good side and get more sales but to potentially reel in new viewers. In fact, the numbers are pretty strong on this one: the estimates range from an 8 to 12% increase in engagement just from using transcripts alone. And, people tend to watch these videos to the end also, because listening and reading combined increase information retention vs. just one of the two.
Accessibility is Not Just a Buzzword
What do I mean by this? Well, let me use Pubmed to say it better:
Estimates from the SIPP indicate that fewer than 1 in 20 Americans are currently deaf or hard of hearing. In round numbers, nearly 10,000,000 persons are hard of hearing and close to 1,000,000 are functionally deaf. More than half of all persons with hearing loss or deafness are 65 years or older and less than 4% are under 18 years of age
Clean verbatim transcriptions lead to more closed captions. More closed captions lead to a much higher accessibility quotient and a much higher engagement by hard-of-hearing folk. If you want to bring in every type of audience you can, you can’t really shy away from transcriptions.
Summing Up
So, clean verbatim transcripts are great for many things, and not all of them are immediately obvious. Of course, if you need transcripts, then you need people who can:
- Do it right by being consummate professionals.
- Do it quickly.
- Potentially turn those transcripts into great closed captions and subtitles.
- Provide translation and multi-lingual support (which, by the way, also improves SEO)
- Be trustworthy
What if I told you that here at Bunny Studio we take our transcription work very seriously, and can do all of the above? Thousands upon thousands of happy clients are willing to attest to that fact. Simply put, if you need an awesome transcriptionist that can take care of the process start-to-finish, Bunny Studio is the right place for you.
Drop us a line, we’ll be very appreciative of your business, and we’ll prove it by doing our absolute 100% every single time.
