​Empower seekers: Make sermons discoverable.

by Christopher Mann
​Founder, ReSermon.com

You have a great website, tricked out with all the latest stuff and your sermons are available as an audio or video file. A few weeks after posting, however, you see that this sermon only garnered a few dozen views, and you’re absolutely sure that you live in a city with much more than a few dozen people. 

After the thousands of dollars invested in video equipment, editing software, soundboards and more, you’re scratching your head and wondering if this is worth it. 

The problem may be that your sermon is not discoverable. Search engines like Google or Bing cannot search through your audio and video files and tell Sally Searcher what sermon contains material on her keywords like love, hope, resurrection and so on. (At least, they cannot yet; they’re working on this.) 

Your sermon needs to become discoverable to search engines and that starts with transcription.

Turn your transcription into its own blog post.

After having your sermon transcribed, post it as a distinct blog post at your church website’s blog and announce the sermon’s availability through social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).

Then, create a closed caption file.

Transcription is a critical step, but you might not be done. If you make your sermon available via video, then you need to close caption that video file. 

“But wait, Google now produces automated captioning for videos posted to YouTube.”

Yes, but have you bothered to actually turn on the captioning for one of your sermons on YouTube? Machine transcription is improving, but still far from where it needs to be, and far from what you actually preached; brace for when Google thinks you cussed during your sermon. 
​
Google’s captioning is better than nothing and plays a helpful role in making more content accessible to a lot of people dependent on captioning (more on that later), but the captioning is so poor that Google blushes too.

It gets a little wonky here, but this is important. Search algorithm only indexes manual captioning, not it's own machine captioning.

​That means if you preach on the resurrection, for example, Sally Searcher who is looking for “resurrection” will not find your sermon if you let Google do its machine captioning. Sally will find your sermon, however, if you have uploaded a manual transcription, because Google's indexing formula intentionally values more highly the accuracy of manual transcription over the dubious accuracy of its own machine transcription. 

Recap

1. Get your sermon library transcribed.
2. Post those transcripts as individual blog posts at your church’s blog.
3. Convert transcripts into closed caption files and upload to whatever platform you use (usually, Vimeo or YouTube). 
4. Watch your views and missional impact increase.