In this episode of Speak PR, host Jim James explains why audio and video content are essentially invisible to search engines without textual representation and how transcribing them can dramatically improve SEO, accessibility, and content repurposing. He describes the difference between show notes and true transcripts, emphasizing the need for timestamped SRT files that can be embedded in podcast players and video platforms. Jim outlines his own workflow—hosting on Buzzsprout, using Otter.ai for automated transcription, and having an assistant polish the text—while reviewing a range of transcription services (Otter.ai, Descript, Temi, TryLately) and their pricing models (machine‑only, human‑only, and machine‑then‑human). He details the costs per minute, monthly subscription options, and the ROI for business podcasts. The episode also covers how transcripts enable keyword indexing, improve search rankings, and allow listeners to copy‑paste quotes. Jim discusses turning transcripts into blog‑style articles, subtitles, and multilingual versions (e.g., Mandarin) for global audiences, and using tools like TryLately to create short audiograms for social media. He concludes with a call to action to adopt transcription, subscribe to the podcast, and consider the Speak PR Masterclass for deeper training.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for you if you've got value locked up in your organization and you're just looking for some cost-effective and some simple ways to unlock that through communications. I've been running my own international public relations firm for over 25 years. I've also built 8 companies on 3 continents, so my interest on this podcast is to share with you what I know works. And today I'm going to talk about transcribing audio and video. And the reason for doing this is because Google and Bing and all the search engines can't identify keywords from within audio and video content. And this means that podcasts like this or your video content is not going to be found if it's online. So in terms of SEO, audio and video are in effect invisible except for the tags that you create. So let's look at transcription services. Now, transcription is something that I've been looking at for this podcast. I host on Buzzsprout and I use the otter.ai service. So with every podcast, I then upload the audio to otter.ai and that 35, 36 megabyte file is reduced to text. I then have an assistant in the Philippines called Michaela who will then write that up for me and make that into an article. But what I've not been doing is using those as transcripts. Now we've got show notes, and those are, if you like, a summary of the of the show itself. But the transcript is a special kind of file that is timestamped, called an SRT file. So I'm thinking about this now because the Buzzsprout people have just sent a newsletter today talking about their greater and greater integration with. Companies like Descript to help auto-generate transcripts, which would then run alongside the audio content of the podcast. Now, what this means is that for the experience of the person maybe listening to the podcast, if they want to, they can actually watch the text or read the text. That can be useful, especially if they maybe are hard of hearing. And it's creating a teleprompter effect in a way, much in the same way as now you can do on Apple Music. You can actually have the lyrics come for you when you're listening to the song. Of course, karaoke has been doing this for, for many, many years, and it's a popular way of entertaining oneself, especially in Asia. So the idea of transcripts for audio and video, something that now is coming mainstream and something that I'm going to be looking more actively at. Now we can search on the internet for headlines or subheaders or a sentence by typing into Google. But the transparency and the sort of searchability of the text is really what we're looking to get for the use of the transcripts. Google and, and a few others have started to use the image search, but it's not quite there yet. And of course, that would be moving video, would be even harder. So by having a transcript, we can allow the search engines to index our episodes, which will help us to improve search visibility. And as podcasts and videos, as anyone that markets their videos on YouTube knows, it's extremely hard to get a video or a podcast to be found and to be shared. So what we can also then do is to increase the podcast show rank on the results pages because the keywords that we're putting into our podcast and into our transcripts will appear. And then if we're hosting, of course, these podcasts on a dedicated website, then the search engine page results for those individual websites will improve. The other thing, of course, is this idea that for the listener, there's an opportunity, especially if they're interested in something that has been mentioned, maybe a quote or a reference to a company or a name, they better read it to clarify it and maybe take it away, cut and paste, and share it, for example. And that's something with now the, uh, TryLately, uh, platform that you're able to take video and get snippets with audio transcripts and share the video snippets as little sound bites or little video audiograms on your social media, which again helps with breaking down long-form content, making it into small pieces of legacy content that can be shared over time over social media platforms. So now, what's the way to add a transcript to a podcast or an audiogram? One of the things to make sure of is that you add a timestamp. Now, platforms like Otter and Descript and Temi will all export an SRT file with a timestamp. Okay, now if you don't include the timestamp, then the podcast player can't align the audio with the text. So that's why I can't just add in my article, which I've written, into the transcription section of Buzzsprout. And this will be the same for Libsyn, because once we've made it into an article, of course, we've removed the timestamps. Now the next part then is to, uh, not just cut and paste the transcript, but to try and think of it as a blog. Now the challenge with that, of course, is that if we have a blog, uh, then we're taking out the timestamps. They can be invisible, of course, but, uh, we're often, when we're writing the article, paraphrasing some of the sentences because I've not always speaking in the same way that someone would read. The format is not quite the same. Now you can hire an editor in the same way that I do with mine in the Philippines, and I can help you out if you need to do that. But prior to that, the automation really is the key. So the offerings of companies that I'm going to share with you are both machine transcription and human transcription and machine-to-human editing. Now the issue that I've got is I create in a, in a 20-minute podcast about 1,500 to 2,000 words. That becomes very expensive. I look at, for example, Temi. It's 25 cents or 0.25 cents per minute, which means my typical podcast is going to cost me $5 to transcribe And then if I hire an editor at, for example, $5 an hour, it's costing me maybe $10 to create a podcast, and I'm creating 6 a week. So that's $60 a week for my podcast. Now that's worth it if you've got sponsors, and if you're just doing one a month, for example, then really worth the investment, especially if it's a business podcast. What I found though is the otter.ai application is doing a great job because it has a learning feature within the AI itself. Now, Otter is costing me $8 per month for up to 6,000 minutes, which is more than enough for my use. And I have the app also on my phone, and I use Otter to transcribe my Zoom meetings. So that's a very flexible and useful integrated AI transcription service. There's another one called Descript which has a free option, also then has a creator option at $12 a month. And Temi has the, uh, the price per minute, and then you can also upgrade. So these different technologies for transcription will all create a file which you want to export as an SRT file and then you can embed that within the player, for example, the podcast player. And what I'm looking at for my YouTube channel is adding those as the show notes. But of course, you can also use those SRT files as your subtitle files for your video. Subtitling video is really useful, especially if it's going to go overseas, and especially as many people watch video with the sound off Or for example, if they're traveling on the train or on the bus, they may have— maybe have the voice and the audio right down low or listening to it with their headsets, but they're probably not going to hear it all. So if you've got any key messages that you want to put in, the subtitling is useful. What we do for clients in Asia is that we'll then take the English language file and then translate that, keeping the timecode and translating into Mandarin, for example, so that we can have the option of English or Mandarin subtitles, which is a lot cheaper than dubbing a voiceover. So coming back to the key reason for having subtitles is because the search engines can't find the content within the audio and the video. So what we need to do is to lift that and make it into text, polish it if we want to, if we've got the time and the budget, but then to publish that and with timecode to our social media platforms. And using something like TryLately, you can now actually create audio snapshots and make little edited clips with the, with the text as the social media post. So that's a very cool and very interesting development for anyone that's got a lot of content that they want to repurpose and to share. So thank you for listening to this podcast. There'll be a transcript, as you can imagine, of this. There'll also be show notes. My name is Jim James. Thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. If you like this, do please subscribe. And if you're interested in our Speak PR Masterclass, please come to the speakpr.co website and sign up there because we've got this and all of our methodologies being taught as a masterclass using Thinkific online training plus in-person via Zoom courses. Thank you so much for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and if you're making content, remember to get a transcript and to share it so you can be found.
