Lawyers have to produce a lot of content to compete for organic rankings. Content of course is not just text. There are videos, presentations, ebooks, podcasts, blogs, web stories, and the list goes on. Since videos take a lot of time to produce, it's understandable that law firms would want to get the most mileage out of that content.

But some law firms are concerned that publishing text as a blog entry, that matches the audio of a video they've published, would be seen as duplicate content. Is that true?

Nope. Not according to Google's John Mueller. Recently, a user asked a question about having a blog with the same content that is covered in a video. The user was concerned that Google was analyzing the text of the video and deciding that his blog was duplicate content.

Mueller's response was:
“First of all we don’t do text analysis of the videos and then map them to web pages. If your video has the same content as your blog post it’s still something different. People sometimes go to Google with the intent to read something, and sometimes they go to Google with the intent to watch something or to listen to something, and those are very different things.

We would not say the text in this video is exactly the same as a blog post therefore we don’t show either of them or we only show one of them. So if you have a video that matches your blog post I think that’s perfectly fine.

That’s a great way to spread your information in different channels. I would definitely not stop doing that. I would not take the video down or take the blog post down. If the blog post is not ranking in google then that would be very specific to the blog post and not specific to the video blog post combination.”

This clarification opens up the possibilities of using your videos as text content on your site. Whether that's published as a page, blog entry, or another type of content it is perfectly safe.

How to turn video into text?

1. Do it yourself.

This is the most affordable option as it simply requires you to listen to your video and type what you hear. And since you have an unlimited amount of free time and no other pressing demands on your schedule, this shouldn't be a problem at all, right?

This isn't really a viable option for most lawyers.

Pros: It's free if your time is worthless.

Cons: It will take a lot of time and if you're not a professional transcriber, you will make a lot of errors.

2. Use a bot

Bots have come a long way. A bot can listen to your video and produce text with moderate accuracy. At a cost of just 0.25/minute from services like Temi you can get a transcript in under 1 hour.

Pros: Fast and inexpensive.

Cons: You will have to do a significant amount of grammatical corrections after your transcript is completed.

3. Humans + Bots

More expensive services like Rev.com charge $1.25/minute. The turnaround is 12-24 hours, but the human oversight takes care of bot errors before they get to you. This means you are handed a nearly ready to publish document with few adjustments needed.

Pros: More accurate transcription. Less time you have to spend on edits.

Cons: A little pricier than the alternatives and the turnaround takes longer than the automated services.

Now you know that Google is okay with publishing the content of your videos as text and how to inexpensively do it, it's time to get more mileage out of those valuable videos.