153. Should I Put My Podcast Transcript on My Website? | Podcasting Tips for Online Marketing

FAQ Friday answering the podcasting question of "Should I Put My Podcast Transcript on My Website?"

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Transcript

Welcome to Podcasting for solopreneurs and FAQ Friday, where I answer a podcasting question in five minutes or less. Today's question is should I put my podcast transcript on my website? This question comes from one of my Growth Collective members, Isabel, who's the host of the We Taste Wine Differently podcast. While I did answer her question inside the collective, I thought this might be a question that some of you have too, and so I wanted to answer it here as well. By the way, it seems to be a bit of feast or famine for question submissions. Either I get a bunch at once or I don't have any at all. I have exhausted the current submissions, so this is your reminder to submit a question. If you have one, I promise that I'll answer it all right, back to Podcast Transcripts As a general rule of thumb, I always add a transcript to my episodes within my hosting platform. I do this for accessibility.

Some podcast players automatically transcribe the audio for their users, but some don't, and so I always provide it myself so that it's there for anyone with hearing impairments. That's separate from what we're talking about here today, though. Isabelle is also creating a web page for each episode in order to help drive traffic through Google SEO, and she's wondering whether she should paste the full transcript directly on the page or offer it as a downloadable file. I want to start by saying that creating a dedicated page on your website for each episode is a really advanced move, so way to go, Isabelle. If you're listening and you're not there yet, don't worry. This can be on your list for down the road. So let's talk about the transcript itself. I recommend adding it as text on the page, not as a downloadable file.

Putting it directly on the page is easier for the user. There's no extra clicks or needing to download a file. It's also better for your SEO. Google can crawl that text when it's right there on the page, which means your keywords have a much better chance of helping your site show up in search results. If the transcript is hidden behind a download button, Google won't be able to read it, and that kind of defeats the purpose if you're trying to attract organic traffic with Google SEO. If you want to take it a step further, don't just post the transcript as is. Turn it into a blog post, meaning that you are breaking up the text with headings. You're removing filler words or side comments that really don't make sense in a written format, and you're making it easier to skim by adding bullets, bold text, paragraph breaks, etc.

Google much prefers blog style content over giant walls of raw transcript text. It helps with the readability for the human as well, and it helps just keep your site looking more professional and polished. That being said, reworking the transcript into a blog post does take even more time. And so if you're trying to stay consistent with your episodes in your promotional strategy, and that step is just, you know, one thing too many, it's totally fine to start simple. Even pasting just the raw transcript is better than not including it at all on your website. And again, this is an advanced strategy to begin with, so you don't necessarily have to do all these things. If you have a podcasting question, click the Send me your question link in the episode description and I'll answer it in an upcoming episode. Until next time, happy podcasting.