How Transcribing Your Podcast Episodes Can Increase Your Reach

With more podcast hosts providing podcasters with the option to upload episode transcripts and more podcast apps displaying them, many people are asking, “what’s the benefit to podcast transcripts?” and “should I be using them?”.

It might not seem clear initially, but transcribing your podcast episodes can significantly impact your podcast. Not only does it benefit those that are hard of hearing, but it can also increase your reach and discoverability. Here are some of the several benefits of transcribing your podcast episodes.

1. Transcripts make your content more accessible

Podcasts are excellent sources of information and entertainment; for the most part, they are free and accessible to everyone. That’s one of the things we love most about podcasting.

Transcripts provide a written version of the audio content, making it accessible to those who are hard of hearing or don’t speak English as their first language. This is a great way to make your podcast inclusive and available for a larger audience.

Podcasts should be accessible to everyone. Transcripts make your podcast episodes accessible to those that are hard of hearing.

To further increase the reach of your podcast, you could translate the transcript of your podcast into multiple languages. The Nobody Zone, a true crime series from RTE Ireland, released the podcast in English, Danish, Spanish, German, and Irish.

2. Podcast transcripts help your episodes rank higher in Google

Podcast search within podcast apps is notoriously bad. If you want to find a new podcast in a specific niche, your best option is to get a recommendation from a friend or colleague or look on Google.

When you transcribe your podcast episodes, they become more searchable online. This is where the benefits of podcast transcripts come in. Google will index and rank your episodes higher in search results if your episodes contain transcripts. This can help increase your audience, as people who wouldn’t have found your podcast otherwise will now be able to discover it.

Niki Mosier wrote about the benefits of podcast transcripts on SEO on the MOZ Blog way back in 2019. They saw a 15% increase in organic traffic to the website and a 50% increase in keyword lift after they began adding transcripts of their podcast episodes to their website.

Whilst Google does automatically transcribe audio for search; it’s not perfect. If you want to ensure that Google is reading what you said, it’s best to transcribe your podcast yourself.

3. Transcripts make it easy to share quotes and snippets from your episodes

When promoting your podcast, sharing snippets and quotes from your episodes is excellent. However, finding the best quotes from the episodes is one of the hardest parts. If you transcribe your episodes, finding the best parts to share on social media and other websites is much easier.

Transcripts speed up the process of finding parts of your episode to share on social media.

Instead of scrubbing through the episode to find a juicy piece of content, you can just read the transcript and highlight all the parts you want to share.

The other benefit is it’s so much easier to be quoted and credited by podcasters and publications if you have a transcript of your episode. This could result in a new audience being exposed to your podcast or backlinks back to your podcast, which helps with SEO.

4. Podcast transcripts can be repurposed into blog posts and downloadable resources

Not everyone will listen to your podcast, and that’s okay. Some people prefer to read blog posts or downloadable resources. Instead of creating those from scratch, make the most of the hard work you put into crafting your podcast episodes and modify those.

If you transcribe your episodes, it’s much easier to modify and adapt the content into different formats. Modifying content for other platforms and mediums is a great way to increase the reach of your podcast beyond just podcast listeners. It’s also a huge time saver when creating other content.

Instead of starting a blog post from scratch, repurpose a podcast episode from the transcript.

A great example is the How The Fxck Podcast, where host Ben Goodey interviews industry leaders about topics within SEO and digital marketing. Ben  does an excellent job of repurposing his episodes into blog posts and other educational downloadable resources such as guides and checklists. He gives some of this content away for free, but some are only available if you subscribe to his membership. This is an excellent way to monetise your podcast without putting your whole podcast behind a paywall.

5. Better user experience

We’ve spoken about how transcripts help with discoverability, reaching new audiences, and making it easier to promote your podcast. The last significant benefit of transcribing your podcast is not a benefit for you but for your listener.

Transcripts enable listeners to find key topics and important moments in your episode. This is especially useful when they want to listen to a specific part of a new episode or revisit older episodes. I’ve lost count of how many times I scrubbed through an episode to find a particular part, only for it to be on a different episode.

Podcasts should be accessible and available to everyone. For that reason alone, transcribing your podcast should be viewed as an essential part of podcasting. The fact that transcribing your podcast episodes also increases your audience and engagement and can be used to repurpose your content is a bonus.