Don’t Create Shownotes – Simply Publish a Transcript…

Summary

Episode Overview

Title: Don’t Create Shownotes – Simply Publish a Transcript…
Date: July 17, 2025
Hosts: Mike Wilkerson & Bryan Entzminger
Main Theme:
This episode of The Podcast Gauntlet tackles a hot debate in podcasting: Should you skip traditional show notes and just publish a full transcript? Mike and Bryan break down the value, drawbacks, accessibility factors, and persistent myths around podcast transcriptions, especially versus well-crafted show notes. With candid opinions, lived experiences, and a bit of humor, they challenge industry “must-dos” and invite their audience to reconsider what really serves listeners and search engines.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Allure and the Reality of Podcast Transcripts

• Transcripts are trendy, but…

  • Mike highlights the increasing popularity of transcription services in podcasting.

    “Transcription services, they're all the rage inside of podcasting, but I gotta tell you, they're not the most compelling use of time.” (00:05, Mike)

• Reading Transcripts is Often a “Landmine” for Listeners

  • Transcripts capture every spoken word—including filler, stumbles, and quirks—which makes them unwieldy and hard to read.

    “When you actually read the transcript... those are the things that are also recorded inside of a transcript that are absolute landmines to sit and read.” (01:59, Mike)

2. Practical Use-Cases for Transcripts

• Value Exists—But It’s Specific:

  • Both hosts agree transcripts are valuable for:

    • Search within episode libraries (not SEO): Finding moments or specific phrases across many episodes.
    • Accessibility: Especially for the deaf or hard of hearing.

    “If somebody is unable to listen, having that there is probably the next best thing.” (05:23, Bryan)

  • Transcripts as Captions:

    • Especially when properly formatted and timestamped (e.g., Podcasting 2.0 captions).

    “I think the real value of a transcription is if it can be turned into a timestamped caption set.” (05:44, Bryan)

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Myths and Realities

• The Myth:
  Publishing transcripts dramatically improves SEO.

• The Reality:
  Both Mike and Bryan refute that full transcripts alone offer serious SEO benefits, especially compared to coherent, structured show notes or articles.

  “If what you're providing is a terrible reading experience, people won’t do that. …If you're using that as your show notes and the argument is SEO, I think it's a fool's errand.” (13:10, Bryan)

  • Supporting Argument:
    Google may favor shorter, well-written summaries and bullet points over giant blocks of messy, unformatted transcript text.

    “But if there is one reasonably well written article in the 500 plus word range, it's probably going to rank better because it's going to be coherent and it's going to be topical.” (13:52, Bryan)

4. Personal Experience & Accessibility Context

• Mike’s Experience:

  • Mike shares his background producing “transcripted podcasts” for the deaf community, including the cost, painstaking process, and ultimately low engagement from the target audience—even among those who needed it most.

  “Even the people I was making a transcripted podcast for, I. E. The deaf community or the deaf and hard of hearing community, it didn't sell.” (08:20, Mike)

  • Accessibility Remains the Strongest Case:
    • New tech has made this easier and more practical, but it doesn’t solve the core readability problem.

5. Show Notes vs. Transcripts — What Do Listeners Actually Want?

• Preference for Summaries:

  • Most listeners would much rather have a short paragraph and bullet points than scroll through a massive, unstructured transcript.

  “As a listener, I would rather have a three sentence paragraph and three bullet points or even skip the bullet points than to have to try and scroll through an hour of transcription.” (10:50, Bryan)

• The Reading Experience is Key:

  • A transcript without context or structure is often unusable for most listeners.

6. Community Challenge: “Prove Us Wrong!”

• Clarion Call for Examples or Proof:
  • The hosts invite listeners to submit examples of transcripts that truly work as show notes, or studies that prove real SEO value.

    “Where are the great transcripts that we need to go read to understand the samples of the power of transcripts? …I desperately want to see it.” (11:31, Mike)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Transcription services, they're all the rage inside of podcasting, but I gotta tell you, they're not the most compelling use of time.”
  Mike Wilkerson, 00:05

• “When you actually read the transcript... those are the things that are also recorded inside of a transcript that are absolute landmines to sit and read.”
  Mike Wilkerson, 01:59

• "We don't talk like we read. ...Our brains just process it differently. I don't know why. I'm not a scientist. I just know that's true."
  Bryan Entzminger, 02:53

• “If I see that it's a transcription, I'm done, right?”
  Bryan Entzminger, 10:58

• “I am of the opinion, unscientific and untested as it is, that a transcript is only marginally better than a paragraph and two bullet points.”
  Bryan Entzminger, 12:38

• “If you read the transcript, you'll probably want to come and meet us with a gun and shoot us and never do that again.”
  (Humorous hyperbole about how bad reading raw transcripts can be)
  Bryan Entzminger, 13:53

• “Where are the great transcripts... that will instantly showcase... the power and validity of search engine optimization?”
  Mike Wilkerson, 11:31

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:05 – Mike introduces topic; critiques the hype around transcripts
• 01:20-02:33 – Hosts discuss readability and “landmines” in transcripts
• 03:32-05:00 – Exploring show notes vs. transcript presentation; formatting challenges
• 05:00-06:16 – Bryan praises transcripts for accessibility/search but draws the line at using them as show notes
• 06:16-09:30 – Mike recounts his real-world transcript project for the deaf, lessons learned
• 10:30-11:31 – Bryan shares the listener’s perspective: show notes vs. raw transcripts
• 11:31-12:38 – Hosts issue a “clarion call” for definitive proof or exceptional examples
• 12:38-14:10 – Bryan analyzes SEO claims, readability, and Google’s possible preferences
• 14:10-End – Hosts wrap up with humor and another call to audience participation

---

Tone & Style

• Direct, conversational, at times irreverent.
• Candid and evidence-driven.
• Accessible for both beginner and seasoned podcasters.

---

Summary

Mike and Bryan challenge the industry dogma that posting raw transcripts is a superior or sufficient replacement for thoughtful show notes. While they acknowledge the importance of transcripts for accessibility and special use-cases like searching within episode libraries, they strongly critique the idea that transcripts offer concrete SEO advantages or a good reading experience for most users. Instead, they advocate for concise, structured show notes, and throw open the gauntlet: If you know of a transcript that really works or a study that proves its value, send it in.

For podcasters: Don’t fall for myths—think critically about what actually serves your audience. If you use transcripts, do so intentionally, and never at the expense of clarity and usability.

Transcript

[A]

You are listening to the two guys talking Podcast Network. Many things are said during a podcast. In fact, you know what? You can read all about it. That's right. Transcription services, they're all the rage inside of podcasting, but I gotta tell you, they're not the most compelling use of time. I mean, like, have you ever actually read a transcript of your podcast? If you haven't, I got good news, but I got more bad news. And we're gonna talk about all of it inside this episode of the podcast Gauntlet. Greetings, everybody. I'm Mike Wilkerson, one of your hosts.

[B]

And I'm Brian Ensminger, the other one of your hosts.

[A]

Brian. It's time to throw down, discuss. Rise and shine in podcasting inside this episode. And today's focus is transcri. I love the concept of transcripts, mostly because, you know, if you think to yourself, okay, well, I say reasonably valuable things inside of my podcasts. And so, I mean, it's gotta be great that it's all written down in a great form for people to just sit and read, right?

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

In fact, the value of search engine optimization, my God, it's gotta be skyrocketing through the roof. Correct.

[B]

I'm so glad you brought up the value of SEO, because I think we want to talk about that. And no, no, it's not right.

[A]

And this is where I want everybody to just hit the pause button, not on our podcast, but on your mind. And I want you to just take in the ideas and the concepts that Brian and I are going to talk about when it comes to transcripts tonight. Because the fact of the matter is, again, as a data guy, I love to see reports of just about everything that culminates data and information, because, one, it allows you to definitely hunt and search through things. When I say the. The words throw down, it'd be cool if I can go through something that has decompiled every word that Brian and I have ever said inside of an episode, and I can find it instantaneously, man, Giant checkbox on that. That's super. But when you actually read the transcript, especially those of you with little audio picadillos, like the things that are featured in the always famous Amara, you know, reels that I send to my clients, those are the things that are also recorded inside of a transcript that are absolute landmines to sit and read.

[B]

Totally. I'm with you. Like, I think there's value in transcripts. I think where we're headed with this is, yeah, transcripts are good things. Good for Some things, but not good for some other things. As an example, I've just been stumbling over my words. So unless Mike edits that out, the transcript would have me saying a bunch of gibberish followed by hopefully something that makes sense right about now. But even beyond that, even if the transcript has been cleaned up, we don't talk like we read. And so when we process audio, we hear it differently than if we were to read the same thing. Our brains just process it differently. I don't know why. I'm not a scientist. I just know that's true. And so when I. There have been times where I've been really interested, I want to go find a transcript and just kind of scan through it because I don't have time to listen to somebody blab on for an hour about something when I really only want a couple of minutes. My experience has been, if I actually have to read the whole thing, I'd rather not. I'll just leave it at that.

[A]

Yeah. Well, hey, how about inside of the. The actual presentation of a podcast episode? When I think about the show notes for the entries that I make for, say, the podcast Gauntlet. If you go check out our website right now, if you go to podcast gauntlet.com the. The first thing that comes up is our front presentation page that has the 101 episode link on it and then links to the library and then links to every way that you can subscribe, like communicate with us all that's on the front page of that. But inside of the library entries is each of the libraries. And so does that mean that that transcript that is. I don't even know how many pages it would be or how many paragraphs it would be. In fact, you know what? It would be zero paragraphs. Because that's how transcripts work. It's line item text, line item text, line item text, and nothing else. It doesn't format it, at least to my knowledge. Are you ready to read that? Are you ready to read all of the Amaranga Nos? Are you. When you have the. I'm doing this intentionally because can you imagine, can you imagine me, what I just said, being in a transcript and you trying to stumble over it as you read it?

[B]

I mean, I'm editing right now.

[A]

Right, right. It is, in addition to it being an audio landmine, which is why we have editors, it's also just a text landmine set that is just waiting for your eyeballs to explode. Because that's what's going to happen when you try to read this.

[B]

Yeah. So I mean, to your point, there are some things that I think transcripts are good at. One is availability of search. I'm not getting onto search engine optimization. I'm not talking about that. That's, I think, a separate topic. But if you have a set of episodes and you want to search for where words showed up, if there's a particular topic, that's an easy way to do it, especially on a website, because it's got a search function. I think another one, like you talked about either replacing show notes or adding them to the show notes. It's not really my preference. However, if somebody is unable to listen, having that there is probably the next best thing. So I'm like, okay, I can do that. I think the real value of a transcription is if it can be turned into a timestamped caption set. So there's some of the stuff in the Podcasting 2.0 ecosystem that allows for transcriptions to be turned into captions. And that I think is great and can be implemented really well so that the person on the end who's listening can see your transcript. So if they can't listen or if they're in an environment that's loud and they're missing words, they've got that there. I think that's an incredibly wise use of a transcript, however you do it, just as long as you format it correctly. But do you want to talk about the SEO part of it? Because I know that's one of the things I've seen is you need to publish the transcript for SEO.

[A]

Really? I want to go back even further than that. I want to talk about something that I did and commissioned inside of 2008. 9 was something called the transcripted podcast series. The transcripted podcast series is exactly what it sounds like. I paid people here in the US to transcribe podcasts and it was hell for the people that did it. Not only was it hell for them, it was hell for people to communicate back with me to ask questions about what was being said or how something should be represented in the case of when the instance would come up. Because really back then there weren't any rules. The automation side of transcription was not there. So that when you pick up a modern day smartphone now, you can essentially do whatever you want to where you open up a. I'm just going to use Google as a sample where I can hit the microphone and if I've clicked appropriately, you can now see the words that I'm saying start to appear on the screen inside of a variety of either apps yeah. Or inside of an email compilation message, they will actually just start to appear as Google hears them and tries to approximate them and then showcase them out. I know this because originally, for those that don't know my wife is deaf, that's a lot of how she would interact with people before they came out with specific apps where somebody would say, hello, I'm so glad that you could come. I'm so sorry that you're deaf. We're going to try to accommodate you as best we can. However, just know it's going to be a little slow going because of that. Now, that can all be showcased inside of sign language very easily in a whole lot shorter period of time. But if you're standing in front of my wife and you have no sign language skill set, how are you going to convey that exactly? Well, how we are able to do that, especially now there are a series of apps that are made to do that where rather than having to go into a specific app or whatever, there are now shortcuts and buttons available on the desktops or the front showpieces of your smartphones. She hits the button and then she just looks at them and goes. For those of you that are listening, I'm doing the okay, now talk motion sign that is kind of universal for those that are deaf that want people to just go ahead and speak. And so when those people speak, she can now just start reading the words. And as she starts seeing the words, she'll begin nodding like I am on the screen right now. Then the communication can at least start and, or happen. And so she can either respond or she can write something down or whatever. The method that they're going to try to communicate something is back in the, in the mid aughts. I was paid by one of my sponsors, Relay Missouri, which is a faction of Sprint, to make the transcripted podcast set of podcasts. And so I did, for a series of seven months, everything that appeared on my podcast network, which at that time There were probably 12, 13, 14, probably 14, 15 live podcasts. Every single one of those shows for that period of time was a transcripted podcast. It cost me a fortune. But I'm really glad that sprint/relay Missouri was proud to pay for those things because I need the money to do it. It was incredibly expensive, incredibly detailed, and unfortunately it didn't track well. So for even the people I was making a transcripted podcast for, I. E. The deaf community or the deaf and hard of hearing community, it didn't sell. And so if it's not going to Sell inside of the deaf and hard of hearing community, you know, the people that can't hear the podcast. Why are we going to think that somehow, out of thin air, it's going to work better for people that can hear and then read it? That was the first rub for me in regard to transcription. The second one was one that we've already talked about, which is, have any of you ever read your own transcripts? Because if you haven't, it's hard. It's hard to read. As much as all of us, including me on the front end of all of our podcast Gauntlet episodes. I try to compile in my brain something of a cold open that is coherent so that I'm not stumbling through things. I'm trying to entertain you and get you engaged into the podcast episode within 20, 25 seconds or so. Ish *. I like doing that, but it's a skill set. What do you think, Brian?

[B]

I think that the use case that you're talking about, deaf and hard of hearing, is probably the ideal use for a transcription. Obviously, it's going to be harder to read than if it was written in prose. I get that. But I think that's the ideal use. I think the thing that I kind of fall down on, and I think we've already kind of touched on this, but we see people saying essentially, don't bother writing show notes, just publish the transcription. And we've already talked about how terrible it is to read. I've also heard the. And so, like, on that front, as a listener, I would rather have a three sentence paragraph and three bullet points or even skip the bullet points than to have to try and scroll through an hour of transcription in my podcast app using my finger. That is literally not going to happen. It's just if I see that it's a transcription, I'm done, right?

[A]

Yeah. And one of the best parts. And again, I'm really glad that we're able to ask an audience. The fact is that we've started latching onto a really good, solid, niche audience. And I know that you guys will chime into clarion calls. And so here is one of the first clarion calls of this episode. Where are the great transcripts that we need to go read to understand the samples of the power of transcripts? Where are they? All you gotta do is jump onto our website over@podcast Gauntlet.com, fill out the quick web form and tell us where to go to read these immaculate conception transcripts that are out there that will instantly showcase a variety of things. First, something that is not a text written stumbling landmine block that we have to trudge through. Well, I desperately want to see it. Second, something that showcases the power and validity of search engine optimization. Power inside of transcripts. Because that's always in the argument. It's always in the myth that you must have transcripts available. It is always there. It usually leads the pack inside of the discussion.

[B]

I am of the opinion, unscientific and untested as it is, that a transcript is only marginally better than a paragraph and two bullet points. And the reason I say that, like I get that when Google looks at a paragraph and three bullet points from a text perspective, it's probably not going to care that much. But. But they're indexing audio, so there's a little bit of transcription going on already. But on the flip side, if that is your written content, Google is in the business of indexing things that people want to read and refer to. And if what you're providing is a terrible reading experience, people won't do that. I'm not saying don't link to a transcript. I'm not saying don't have it so that people that want to quote you can't find the quote and just copy and paste. What I'm saying is if you're using that as your show notes and, and the argument is SEO, I think it's a fool's errand. I think it's only the really, really, really long tail keywords that people aren't searching for where that might have any value. Because if there is one reasonably well written article in the 500 plus word range, it's probably going to rank better because it's going to be coherent

[A]

and

[B]

it's going to be topical. It's not going to meander all over the place like this podcast episode did, which is great. This is where we, this is where we express our personality and the crazy that makes up me and Mike, you get to know us. If you read the transcript, you'll probably want to come and meet us with a gun and shoot us and never do that again.

[A]

Totally true. And then the third thing, we're kind of alluded to that, but I'm telling you, I want someone to stop what you're doing, go and hunt out the information and drop a link to wherever it lives on Mr. Internet, anywhere is the study. Somewhere in the span of podcast verse, somebody has done at least one study that will show me. Hey, Mike, you know you and Brian and that podcast glovey microphone thing you're an idiot because. Oh, here, let me show you. And then we're going to read this new report, ideal of Instant Karma, where somebody shows us what you see. Transcripts are the third coming of podcastum. That's all I want. I want one of those three things to happen. And I know that you guys can pull it off because you are the Podcast Gauntlet audience. So throw down, access our website [e-mail], fill out the quick web form, and tell Brian and I where all of these samples live. But most importantly, what you think about transcripts inside of the podcast verse. Until next time, I'm Mike Wilkerson, one of your hosts.

[B]

And I'm Brian Ensminger, the other meandering host you have tonight.

[A]

Thanks for throwing down discussing Rising and Shining in podcast. See you for the next episode. By.