Recently I came across a website called EverZing, developers of software that can index spoken words. I was very excited about this sort of technology and immediately though about how terrific this would be for SEO.
Many websites are using videos and audio clips (podcasts) more and more, but they do not seem to inherit any credit from search engines for the unique content embedded within this streaming media. I’m not talking about Google Universal Search. Rather, I’m referring to the text version of spoken words within audio files.
When one searches for a keyphrase that was heard on a video or in a song on the radio, and would like to find the source online, then it is very difficult or sometimes impossible to find it. That’s because search engines can (not yet) turn audio into text effectively, at least not yet on a mass scale.
So there is a lot of value “locked away” in sound bits and video files, because users cannot search for relevant content that is hidden within a podcast or audio recording.
Audio indexing can solve this sort of issue and give websites with podcasts, videos or audio a major boost on search engine results pages (SERPs). Current search technology only allows users to search for video and audio files based on titles and descriptions. That’s quite primitive, is it not?
“Software as a Service” (SaaS) solutions such as EveryZing make it possible for media to become discoverable. Content is extracted from the media asset (video or audio) and can then be published as text, allowing search engines to crawl and index the content. – Just imagine how many websites could publish so much new content much more frequently!
Google Audio Indexing – Good for SEO?
Browsing through Google Labs, I came across another audio indexing project called Google Audio Indexing (short GAUDI), which is even able to directly crawl video and audio using speech recognition technology. GAUDI functions just like Googlebot, which crawls text content on a website without the use of manual “pre-indexing” solutions such as EveryZing.
However, at this stage GAUDI searches only those videos uploaded on the YouTube political channels. I am looking forward to seeing the impact of “Big Brother Google” once this starts to index audio from all websites on web, and the output is fed into the main Google index.
In the meantime I will continue testing upcoming audio text publishing solutions and how these can be used for search engine optimisation purposes, and of course I will also keep my eye on Google’s Audio Indexing project as well.