Social SEO is nothing new. We’ve been treating Pinterest, YouTube and even Giphy as search engines for months now. With rising CPCs and fluctuating search volumes on Google as a result of the recession, SEO agency and other businesses shouldn’t ignore where customers are spending their time online. Consumers use various channels to seek for information, content, ideas, and goods. especially taking the time to look.
For marketers and companies, TikTok is quickly evolving into the most popular, downloaded, and profitable platform to be on right now. for both facilitating demand for search (showing up when users search on the platform) and for generating demand. The channel has unparalleled ability to influence people.
Why is TikTok SEO Important?
TikTok advertises itself as an entertainment platform rather than a search engine, although users still use it for searches. Nearly 40% of Gen Z users choose TikTok and Instagram over Google search, according to internal statistics from Google.
TikTok’s capacity to offer consumers worthwhile and captivating material that is socially recognised by a community of like-minded people and artists is the primary driving force behind TikTok’s entry into search. TikTok magnifies the already significant proportion of the 92% of customers who trust word-of-mouth over all other types of advertising because it functions naturally like word-of-mouth does (but on a global scale)
More and more businesses are using TikTok as a tool to engage viewers in a more direct and honest way as a result of the platform’s entry into the search engine market and its ingrained culture of authenticity. TikTok SEO is crucial in this situation because it allows companies and content producers to make sure that the proper people see their TikTok content when they conduct searches.
How to make your videos TikTok SEO-friendly
Identify your audience and their search objectives.
Assess your target demographic and possible TikTok searches before beginning to develop your content piece. Do you want to attract customers who are seeking for the best shampoo products for their hair type? Or are you a brand-new SaaS startup aimed at small business owners that need solutions to increase their level of efficiency at work? The first step to figuring out your target audience’s search intent is to understand your audience and how your brand fits into their life. The information that a user is seeking throughout their search process, or search intent, determines the sort of material the user will find relevant.
Choose appropriate keywords for your video.
Understanding your target audience and their search intent can help you choose the proper keywords to include in your video. When choosing keywords for SEO, there are three important factors to take into account:
- Search volume is the number of individuals that look up your term.
- Relevance measures how closely your content relates to the search term being used.
- Keyword difficulty is a measure of how challenging it is for your material to appear in search results for a certain keyword (greater keyword difficulty indicates a harder-to-rank subject).
Generally speaking, you want to use a keyword that:
- High search volume Indicates this is a keyword that people are looking for.
- High relevancy means your content directly relates to this keyword.
- Low keyword difficulty indicates that there is not already an abundance of relevant information for this term.
However, there is no universally applicable, reliable method for choosing the ideal term. These three criteria of volume, relevance, and complexity may conflict with one another. Aiming for a high search volume might result in high keyword difficulty because other companies and producers are probably already well-versed in the subject matter. Similar to low keyword difficulty, poor relevance may also be associated with it; just because a term is simple to rank for does not guarantee that it is necessarily related to your content.
Determine your hashtag strategy.
There are more considerations besides “the more the merrier” when developing a hashtag strategy for TikTok SEO. A good hashtag approach combines long-tail and high-volume keywords to target both breadth and depth.
Long-tail keywords are terms that are longer, more precise, and have a higher purpose and are more likely to be used later in the search process. These searchers are no longer just surfing; instead, they are entering terms with a particular action in mind, such as making a purchase, going somewhere, or finding an answer to a question.
In contrast, high-volume keywords are often shorter, more broad search terms that receive a lot of traffic. A huge audience can be reached by ranking for high-volume keywords, but search intent will be weaker and conversion rates will probably be lower than for long-tail keywords.
Additionally, indexing is an effective technique to make use of your hashtags and raise the visibility of specific content series. For instance, you might use the hashtag #[account name]contentcreatortips to bring together many videos that cover the same subject if you intend to build a multi-part series on tips for content creators.
Incorporate the keywords into your video.
There are 5 ways to incorporate keywords into your TikTok videos:
- In-video text
- Speech
- Captions
- Hashtags
- Automated closed captions
And if possible, all 5 of these options should be used.
Increasing the number of times your chosen keyword appears in your video guarantees that your content is optimised to rank at the top of the search results page for that term. The more times you use your keyword (within limits), the more likely it is that the platform will identify your video as relevant, keyword-related material.
One thing to keep in mind is that you should make sure your keyword is on the cover slide and is mentioned in the first three seconds of your movie. By doing this, you not only notify TikTok about the subject of your video but also make it possible for high-intent searchers who are seeking for information to help them with their search queries to quickly identify your movie.
Refine your SEO approach using the lessons from earlier videos.
The final step is more of a general suggestion to constantly utilise prior films as a learning tool for improving your TikTok SEO approach for future videos. It is not necessarily related to any particular video. This may take the form of recycling hashtags from popular videos, expanding on a subject that resonated with your target audience, or even studying the comments on earlier videos to learn more about what your audience wants. A/B testing comparable hashtags or hashtag sets to see which ones are actually bringing visitors to your content is another potential for further learning.