With over one billion monthly active users, TikTok is among the most popular social networks in the world, eclipsed only by Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. It’s also rapidly becoming the social app of choice for millennials and generation Z, who together make up roughly 75% of its global base. Suffice it to say, if your brand is looking to target either of those audiences, it’s in your best interest to gain a foothold.
That’s actually not as difficult to do as you might expect—or at least, it’s no more or less challenging than any other social network. As is usually the case, success starts with a solid marketing strategy and a decent understanding of search engine optimization. With that in mind, here are the three most important things you must understand about TikTok SEO.
The Basics of Topic Ideation Remain the Same
Plenty of brands treat social media as some sort of arcane, unknowable entity, as if they’re convinced they’ll need to reinvent the wheel in order to succeed. The reality, however, is that the foundation of TikTok SEO, topic ideation, is the same as on any other site. To summarize:
- Understand your audience—who they are, what they’re looking for, and why they might be interested in your brand.
- Leverage sites like Quora and tools such as Answer the Public to research the questions your audience is asking and the topics that interest them.
- Pay attention to how any topics you identify relate to your brand’s niche.
- Identify the specific keywords in those questions and topics, then leverage them in your TikTok videos, captions especially.
- Be respectful of your audience’s time. There’s rarely a reason for a TikTok video to be longer than a minute.
Trends and Hashtags Are Crucial for Discoverability
Especially with Google’s eventual plan to index TikTok video content, choosing the right hashtags and trends goes a long way toward increasing your brand’s reach and visibility. Successfully leveraging more popular trends can generate a torrent of views and engagement, potentially even causing your page to go viral. Provided you’ve targeted the right users and linked your TikTok channel back to your website, that also has the potential to lead to a high volume of conversions.
Quality and Consistency Always Win
The phrase ‘content is king’ may be overused, but that doesn’t make it any less true. High-quality, relevant content is the most important factor in your success on TikTok—or really, on any channel. That means crystal-clear audio and video and a well-written script geared towards your audience.
Without those characteristics, it doesn’t really matter how well you optimize your TikTok videos from a search perspective. Reach is all well and good, but only if it’s attached to content that people actually want to watch. Always keep that in mind.
And above all, remember to always create content with purpose.