Last updated: 11/29/2024
Last updated: 11/29/2024
Did you know that according to 3PLAYMEDIA, adding transcripts to your podcast website can result in a 7% increase in search traffic and a 4% growth in inbound links?
And the team at Moz experienced a 15% boost in organic traffic and up to a 50% increase in keyword rankings after adding transcripts to a podcast episode page. 🚀
If you're a podcaster, podcast transcripts should not be an afterthought anymore. Adding transcripts to your podcast episode is essential to make your podcast accessible, easy to understand for search engines and boost your SEO.
Moreover, because a transcript provides a word-for-word text version of your podcast, having one serves as a convenient starting point to repurpose your podcast into various content pieces. This includes creating episode highlights, blog posts, social media content, and even finding quotes for your social media posts.
The main reason why podcasters avoid writing transcripts despite all of its benefits is that it is highly time-consuming.
To tackle this, many podcasters prefer to outsource their podcast transcripts to a transcription service. There are numerous options available, each offering distinct benefits.
If you want to outsource your podcast transcriptions, there are 2 ways to do it:
We’re going to help you evaluate what are the pros and cons of each option, how much they cost, and how to avail them.
So let’s dive in 👇
In a human transcription service, you avail the help of a transcription agency or a freelancer who listens to your podcast episode from start to finish and types it out word-for-word.
Podcasting agencies are companies that provide an array of editing services to assist podcasters, and transcription is among the services they offer. Typically, these agencies charge between $50 and $70 per episode for transcription, depending on the episode's length, setting the price at around $1.50 to $2.50 per minute.
Some companies also specialize in providing human transcription services as their main offering. These companies can often provide more competitive prices compared to podcasting agencies that focus on a broader range of podcast production services.
Here are some reputable human transcription companies:
Rev employs a network of professional human transcriptionists to ensure accurate and high-quality transcriptions. And they are known for their fast turnaround times. With Rev you can receive your transcripts within 24 hours, making it a good choice for those with tight deadlines.
Rev costs $1.5/minute to transcribe your podcast & it guarantees 99% accuracy. You can also choose to rush your order for $2.75/minute and receive your transcript sooner.
In addition to transcription, Rev also offers services like captioning and translation, providing an all-in-one solution for all your content needs.
GoTranscript is a budget-friendly transcription service that provides accurate human transcriptions at an affordable price. They assure a 99% accuracy in transcriptions by employing staff who have more than 5 years of transcribing experience and by doing quality checks through experienced editors.
GoTranscript supports over 50+ languages making it a good choice for a global audience. The price of transcription starts from $.0.84/ minute for a 5 day delivery and goes upto $2.75/minute for 6 hour rush-delivery.
GMR Transcription is one of the highly reputed transcription agencies with 20 years of experience. The key benefit of availing their service is that all the transcription work by GMR Transcription is handled exclusively by US-based transcriptionists with guaranteed file security.
And they offer 2 different types of pricing. One for clean audio and another for difficult audio (if your podcast is poorly recorded or has background noise). Prices start from $1.75 per minute for clean audio transcriptions and $2.25 per minute for difficult audio transcriptions with a standard 3-5 days of turnaround time.
These are 3 of the popular companies which offer transcription services.
Regardless of the service you choose, transcription services offered by agencies generally maintain high quality. These agencies employ experts and experienced staff to manually transcribe, ensuring rigorous quality control over the results.
But this expert service comes at the cost of high prices. If you follow a publishing schedule of 4 episodes/month for your podcast, the transcription expenses charged by an agency will set you back by ~$200/month (assuming the agency charges $1.5/minute and your episodes are 30 minutes long)
For budding podcasters on a limited budget, outsourcing podcast transcription to a human transcription company might not be a viable option
Pros of hiring a human transcription agency/company:
Cons of hiring a human transcription company:
If the services offered by human transcription companies are too expensive to consider, another option is to outsource your transcription to a freelancer.
Freelancer transcribers are an affordable alternative to agencies when it comes to manually transcribing your podcast & generating other promotional content. You can find a large number of freelance transcribers available on platforms like Fiverr. Top quality freelancers typically charge between $1-$1.5 per minute, but prices can go as low as $0.20, based on the freelancer’s experience and turnaround time.
While hiring a freelancer, you need to keep in mind that freelancers highly vary in their skill and experience. So make sure you’re selecting an expert to transcribe your podcast either by checking their portfolio or giving test assignments, since there are a lot of freelancers who provide low quality services on these platforms.
How to find a freelancer transcriber on Fiverr to write your podcast transcripts:
Example: We’re going to select “english” language and “time reference” option for our transcript
These are the steps to outsource your podcast transcript to a freelance transcriber. And you can repeat this process, if you want the help of a freelancer to generate other marketing content from your transcripts like blogs, social media posts & newsletters.
One thing to note before you hire a freelancer is that freelancers highly vary in their skill and experience. So make sure you’re selecting the right person by checking their portfolio or test assignments to avoid any future headaches.
Pros of hiring a freelancer:
Cons of hiring a freelancer:
This is the quickest & most efficient way to transcribe a podcast that skips all the time-consuming manual work.
In this method, all you need to do is upload your podcast to an AI transcript generator like Podsqueeze or to a podcast platform with automatic transcriptions, like CoHost. AI will listen to your podcast & automatically generate transcripts and all other marketing content for your episodes within a few minutes.
Automated AI transcriptions present a cost-effective option, often as low as 1/20th of the price of hiring a human transcription service.
Pros of Automated AI transcriptions:
Cons of Automated AI transcriptions:
Here is how you can generate your podcast transcripts and other marketing content for your podcast at just the click of a button using AI.
Within a few minutes, you will get the transcript of your episode complete with timestamps and speaker identification. You can either directly copy the transcript to use on your website or choose to download it as an SRT file if you wish to use it as captions for your video podcast.
But that’s not all! Podsqueeze also simultaneously repurposes your transcript into multiple pieces of marketing content required to promote your podcast on all platforms.
Here’s the list of all the content pieces Podsqueeze automatically generates from your audio file:
Podsqueeze offers a free tier that lets you transcribe upto 50 minutes of podcast time per month with AI. This allows you to fully test it out with your podcast before deciding to subscribe.
And here you have it! We hope this article has provided valuable insights to guide you in selecting the best transcription service for your podcast, whether it's the expertise of human transcription or the cost-effectiveness of AI!
A podcast transcription service converts spoken audio content into written text, making it accessible to a wider audience, improving SEO, and aiding in content repurposing for sharing on social media or as short blog posts.
Podcast transcription service pricing structures vary, often based on factors like audio length or even per episode. The price can range from $0.84 per minute (just like Go transcript) up to $2.50 per minute. It's just important to explore different options to find what suits your budget. Alternatively, you can generate your podcast transcript using our Podsqueeze AI with 90% accuracy.
There are many factors to look into. We suggest you consider factors like accuracy, turnaround time, pricing, privacy and security measures, additional features (like timestamping), and customer support (by the way, all these factors could cost extra for you or you can get them all using any suitable AI tools).
Repurpose your podcast content with AI