When people hear the term SEO, they mostly think of ranking on Google — the world’s largest search engine. In fact, some people have suggested that Google has even become synonymous with search. However, with the rise of social media platforms like TikTok, more people than ever are using social media for search.
With this in mind, the best way to get your content seen on TikTok or your brand in front of potential customers is to optimize your content for TikTok search. The same principles can also be applied to other platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. No matter where you’re uploading your videos, you’ll want to make sure that the titles, descriptions, and metadata are written in the best way for the platform to read your content and deliver it to your audience.
- Understand what TikTok SEO is and why it’s essential.
- Learn the steps to optimizing your TikTok videos.
- Build a TikTok strategy for your business or brand.
Summary
What is SEO for TikTok?
TikTok SEO works in a similar way to traditional search engine optimization. It’s the process of enhancing your videos and their descriptions to rank higher in search results. In the same way, you would research and use keywords for traditional SEO — you can also use those strategies to help your TikTok videos perform better and show up in more search results inside and outside of the platform.
How TikTok categorizes your content in the search engine will depend on several factors, including sounds, hashtags, user interactions, engagement, and even language preferences. You’ll need to consider each of these elements to ensure you maximize your potential reach.
How does TikTok’s algorithm work?
How the TikTok algorithms work is a closely kept secret, and there is still quite a bit of mystery around the engine behind the popular platform. Understanding how TikTok selects and shares your video can help you create projects for a particular target market.
What we know is —the algorithms learn what sort of content a user likes based on the interactions of the viewer and the data it has from the creator. If a person regularly likes and engages with content tagged with #DogsofTikTok, the platform will recommend more content using these tags.
When you’re uploading a video to TikTok, the platform will index it using the data you have made available through your description, hashtags, sound effects, music, and filters. Initially, the video will be shown to your followers and a small selection of other users. TikTok will then look at your video’s engagement and user interaction before adding it to more For You sections.
If your video proves popular, TikTok will increase the reach of your video by showing it in more For You threads, so the more engagement your video gets, the more it is likely to get until you have a viral hit.
How to optimize SEO for TikTok
While you can’t cheat the TikTok algorithms, there are ways to work with it to get your content seen. Sometimes you can add the optimizations after you’ve created the video, but often, the videos that achieve the highest engagement will have been created taking the algorithm into account.
Keywords
Much like you would for traditional SEO research. Start by looking up the search volume for relevant keywords. You can even use TikTok’s keyword insights tool to see which keywords are trending and their performance. Then once you’ve compiled a relevant list of keywords, add them to your captions, hashtags, and within your videos. Be sure to do this in an authentic way. TikTok won’t like it if a bunch of seemingly irrelevant keywords are added to a video just to try and help it rank.
Trends
Trends are significant on TikTok, with challenges, stitches, and duets allowing creators to participate in a larger story or movement. Creating content to take part in a trend is a fantastic way of staying current and involved in the community.
You can easily find trending topics and challenges in the TikTok home tab or by looking at trending hashtags. Always thoroughly research the trends you want to take part in to ensure it fits your brand.
Music and sound effects
One of the things to make TikTok so popular among creators is the ability to add popular music and sound effects to your videos. When uploading your videos, you can choose from TikTok’s massive library and use up to 60 seconds of it in your video.
Adding music or sound effect within the TikTok platform allows your content to be indexed and searched using the audio. When music is added, the performer/track will be displayed at the bottom of your videos, giving users a link to check out other content using these assets. Using trending music or sound effects on your videos will recommend your content to users who have liked other videos using the same track.
Hashtags
Hashtags are used across most social media platforms and are a simple way for the creator to add globally used tags to their content. For the algorithms, they create an idea of what the content is about, similar to metadata on a website.
Along with searching through the TikTok home page, you can download many third-party apps that will give you information on the most used hashtags.
Increase your engagement
When you release a video on any platform, the main goal is engagement – you want people to watch, like, share, comment, and subscribe/follow. However, when we talk about increasing your engagement, we don’t mean the interactions on your videos but your interactions with others.
When it comes to social media, only 50% of it is about the media part – the rest is about the social side of the platform. Engaging and interacting with other users is a fantastic way of boosting your profile in the algorithms. Users are more likely to check out your videos and interact in return by being social and interacting with additional content.
Community Guidelines
One surefire way to ensure your video isn’t seen at all is to breach the community guidelines. While it may sound obvious, it’s important to remember that the decision to remove content is made by the algorithms, not by a human being. Any nuance in your videos might be lost in translation.
Your content will be removed if it is found to be duplicate, considered spam, or include overly sexualized content, tobacco and alcohol products, dangerous sports or stunts, or anything that endangers the safety of a minor. Along with your keywords and hashtags, other users can report your content for a perceived breach of community guidelines.
Not Interested
The ‘Not Interested’ button on TikTok allows users to tell the algorithms that your video isn’t to their taste. For individual videos, a few Not Interested clicks stop them from being recommended to anyone. Consistent Not Interested clicks over several videos can damage your account.
The algorithm can’t watch your videos and check the hashtags, keywords, music, and sound effects accurately describe the content, so the Not Interested button is a way for viewers to decide. While you can’t prevent other users from telling TikTok, they are not interested in your content. There are ways in which you can dramatically increase the chances that they will be interested.
Using only accurate descriptions, tags, and trends would be best when optimizing your TikTok videos. Using trends to boost your reach artificially will damage its chances of being seen and interacted with.
How optimizing TikTok SEO can help brands
If you’re a brand or business using TikTok to reach your potential customers, then SEO is vital. When it comes to social media, there is a lot of pressure to get views, but this only applies to influencers who earn based on their audience figures.
For businesses, it doesn’t matter what product or service you are selling not everyone on TikTok will be in your target market. Using a TikTok SEO strategy, you can find a smaller, more targeted audience.
Using TikTok SEO lets you put your content in front of people who may want to buy from you while gathering important sales data that can instruct your future marketing strategy.
There is no doubt that TikTok SEO is a powerful tool for reaching and growing an audience that will interact with and support your content. To build a TikTok SEO strategy that works, you need to carefully consider the purpose of the content, who you want to reach, and the keywords and tags you can use to reach them.
It’s important to remember that creating your content should be fun and rewarding. If you need help coming up with ideas for your TikTok videos, check out the massive library of stock templates, videos, photos, music, and sound effects available at Motion Array.
