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 This American Life 

 

A Case Study on How Transcription Boosts Podcast SEO and Engagement

This American Life (TAL) is a weekly public radio program and podcast. It is one of the most popular podcasts – heard by more than two million listeners each week on over 500 public radio stations in the U.S. with another 2.3 million people downloading each episode as a podcast.

One way that This American Life is able to reach so many listeners is by providing transcripts for each episode – and that’s no accident. The radio and podcast organization knows that transcripts boost SEO, viewership, organic search, and overall engagement with content.

Dive into the mini SEO study to learn more about how transcripts boosted TAL’s SEO.

This American Life Podcast Transcription Example
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The Goals

The Goals

 
This American Life embarked on a project to transcribe its entire audio archive and make transcripts freely available to website visitors. The goals were to a) increase inbound traffic from organic search, b) increase the number of inbound links, c) engage users and create a better user experience by providing alternate ways to consume the content, d) make content accessible to people with hearing disabilities, e) make it easier to pull quotes and reference a section of the audio.

This American Life began transcribing its radio archives in April 2011 and completed the entire backlog by October 2011. Currently, it provides transcripts for new episodes one week after publishing.

 

Transcription for Your Podcast

SEO Impact of Transcription [36 Months] This American Life. Unique Visitors increased with more episodes transcribed

The Results

Increased User Engagement

To assess the impact on user engagement, we looked at the proportion of unique visitors who viewed a transcript. The result was that 7.23% of all unique visitors viewed at least one transcript.

 
 

All Traffic Viewed Transcript % of All
Unique Visitors 15,824,728 1,143,454 7.23%

New Inbound Traffic

To assess the amount of new inbound traffic, we looked at the number of unique visitors who landed on a transcript page (i.e. the first page viewed upon entering the site). The result is that 4.18% of all unique visitors landed on the site via a transcript page. This represents a 4.36% increase of inbound traffic attributable to transcripts.

 

All Traffic Landed on Transcript % of All
Unique Visitors 15,824,728 661,664 4.18%

Direct, Referral, and Search Traffic

Drilling down on the new inbound traffic, more than half came from search. In fact, 6.26% of all unique visitors who came from search traffic landed on a transcript page. This represents an increase of 6.68% in search traffic attributable to transcripts.

 

All Traffic Viewed Transcript % of All
Direct Traffic 5,425,304 147,203 (2.71%) 2.79%
Referral Traffic 5,352,829 156,592 (2.93%) 3.01%
Search Traffic 5,793,313 362,751 (6.26%) 6.68%

New Inbound Links

In order to assess new inbound links, we looked at the number of external inbound links that point specifically to transcript pages. There are 405 such links as compared to 10,826 external inbound links to all TAL pages. This represents a 3.89% increase in inbound links attributable to the transcript pages. Why would a site link to a transcript page? There are many reasons to do so.

While there is no simple way to compute the impact on authority and Pagerank, this result seems like it should provide a significant boost that helps across all search rankings.

The Conclusion


 
Transcription for podcasts and radio programs provides a number of benefits: accessibility for people with hearing disabilities, improved comprehension for visitors who know English as a second language, ability to follow along in sound-sensitive environments, ability to translate the text to other languages, and the ability to search through the text and reference a section of audio.
Transcription also helps with search engine optimization.

By transcribing its library of radio shows This American Life increased the number of unique visitors to its website by 4.18%. The number of unique visitors who discovered TAL through organic search results increased by 6.68%. The results showed that 7.23% of website visitors engaged with the transcripts. The results also showed that transcripts provide an effective way to increase authority through additional inbound links. In fact, 405 out of 10,826 external inbound links point to one of the transcript pages. This represents a 3.89% increase in inbound links directly attributable to the transcript pages.

How to Make Your Podcast Accessible

About the Study

This American Life (Before Podcast Transcription)

At the time of the podcast SEO study, the This American Life website had a Google Pagerank of 8 and an Alexa Rank of 20,000. The site received about 850,000 unique visitors per month and about two-thirds of the visits were returning visitors. On average, a visitor would remain on the site for about 7 minutes and views 2.5 pages. 97% of visitors know English as their primary language.

Study Methodology

This study aimed to evaluate and quantify the search engine optimization (SEO) benefits of adding audio transcripts to a public website of a radio program. Website data was collected over a 36-month period from April 2011 to March 2014. However, the results of this report are based on the 27-month period from January 2012 to March 2014 (the first several months were excluded to account for transcription processing and for the SEO effects of transcription to propagate). During this period, the TAL website had about 16 million unique visitors and 111 million page views. Google Analytics was used to obtain the data.

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