7 Reasons Podcast Transcripts Help to Grow Your Audience

Podcast transcriptions transform your audio content into multi-platform resources, broadening your reach as a creator.

It’s not every day that listeners enjoy podcasts without experiencing interruptions here and there. When distractions come up, users can often lose their place, put down the podcast or just plain miss valuable content.

With podcast transcripts available, users have more ways to keep up with your most important conversations, whether they’re reading or listening to your podcast.

Here are seven reasons why you should transcribe your podcast, or use Bullhorn.FM to transcribe them for you free:

1. Your Podcast Becomes More Accessible to Listeners

Podcast transcriptions give users greater accessibility to your content. That gives those that are hearing-impaired or can’t otherwise listen a chance to engage with your podcasts without the audio.

What’s more, those who can’t make out the audio clearly because of outside interference have a chance to keep up with what’s going on in the podcast no matter if a loud train rattles by or you find yourself in a library without headphones.

2. Transcriptions Improve Podcast SEO

Your audio content is littered with keywords related to the major topics of your podcast. You want to continue to build authority in this space, and what better way than with SEO that is content-focused.

Search engines are in its early stages of audio recognition but having the text available to Google crawling bots makes it much easier to get your podcast ranked.

Not only is it better for your website’s domain authority (a Google ranking factor), it makes your podcast easier for users to get to since you can search for specific phrases and keywords used during the recordings.

3. It Enables Text-search Capabilities

Like I mentioned in the previous item on this list, it enables users the ability to search through the podcast using text. While this works especially well for search engines, this also works for improving the user experience.

With podcast transcriptions available, users navigating your content can pinpoint the exact places where important information is located without having to spend time scrubbing through audio.

4. It Adds Clarity to Your Content

Transcripts for podcasts act like an insurance policy for getting your message across. Users have more ways of consuming your content, which means accents or faulty audio equipment won’t prevent you from reaching your audience. Transcriptions make your content understandable to your subscribers, making sure your message gets across crystal clear. 

What’s more, many international students learning English have a hard time hearing proper pronunciation but can read and write very well. Transcripts directly serve the international audience, broadening the scope of your podcast and making it more accessible to people all over the world.

5. Transcripts Give You More Content

If you have a blog to go along with your podcast (if you don’t, you really should), you’ll always have articles to publish just by adding a short introduction to every transcribed podcast. Not only will this give you more content users can engage with, it helps with ensuring you have text content in case you ever needed to publish more than just audio.

You could also combine a few of your podcasts transcripts into a book, giving you even more content to develop. As an entrepreneur, transcripts are an easy way to expand your content and make the information you present more accessible.

6. Listeners Get Previews and Reviews

Many users like to go over podcasts before listening to an entire episode to gage subject matter without the commitment.

Not only do podcast listeners get to preview episodes with transcripts before listening, they get the chance to go back and review exact sections of the podcast without having to listen through the entire audio again. This makes reviewing the content much easier to search through, whether you’re the podcaster or listener.

7. It Feels Natural to Follow Along or Jump Ahead

When listening to podcasts, conversations can get off the rails often—ok, a lot. But that’s alright. It’s natural for conversations to get off topic for podcasts host, which often makes for better content. However, not everyone is interested in conversations that’s weren’t as exactly advertised.

Having transcriptions gives users more intuitive ways to interact with your content. Transcripts give users the ability to get to the nitty-gritty portions of your podcast without the fluff. Users also have the added benefit to switch from audio to text whenever they need to, using bookmarks to stay on track.

How can you make sure your podcast has transcripts?

There are many podcast transcription services out there offering transcripts for a cost.

Bullhorn.FM publishes podcasts with transcriptions absolutely free. Every new podcast on our website and app comes with transcripts at no cost to listeners or podcasters. No paid subscription. No cost to download the app.

What’s even better, if you have formatting updates or edits to the automated transcriptions, the Bullhorn team is happy to help. Send your updated transcripts to us and we’ll make sure our database matches your formatting and changes.

Download Bullhorn for iOS and Android

Want free transcriptions? Bullhorn.FM transcribes your newest podcasts free without you having to ask. Direct users to access your transcriptions or use our exclusive call-to-listen feature and grow your audience even more. Share your podcasts on Bullhorn.FM.