TikTok SEO: How To Master This New Trend In 2026

Put simply, the art of performing TikTok SEO has emerged as a valuable investment amongst both brands and content creators in order to fulfil their target audience search intent on TikTok. In this article, we will uncover all you need to know about TikTok SEO in 2026, including best practices and helpful tools to help your video content appear in TikTok searches.

TikTok has rapidly evolved from not just a video entertainment platform but also a capable search engine for its predominantly Gen Z user base. These users are increasingly turning to TikTok to fulfil their specific search queries, as opposed to traditional search engines like Google and Bing.

TikTok’s Increasing Presence as a Search Engine

Notably, TikTok suggests that over 15% of product discoveries are initiated on TikTok, by the over 40% of young people mainly using TikTok and Instagram for their searches. 

Recently, the additions of new features, such as the ‘Creator Search Insights’, a TikTok SEO tool, have reshaped the digital landscape for how consumers interact with search engines. This, combined with the growing number of social media users leveraging TikTok for their search needs, is a crucial opportunity. Knowledge of search engines and social media are mandatory for the relevancy of both content creators and businesses alike.

To best optimise for this TikTok organic strategy, this guide will delve into everything you need to know about how to do SEO on TikTok. From essential SEO TikTok Tools, keyword discovery techniques and insights into where to put SEO keywords, it also equips businesses and content creators with how they could translate this into their existing website SEO strategies.

Optimising for Video Search

The practice of optimising videos for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on video platforms is not necessarily a new concept. YouTube SEO has been a strategy used by many businesses and content creators trying to establish themselves.

For brands and products, it entails guiding viewers to search, ultimately leading them to a website, generating events, B2B leads, conversations and e-commerce sales. Moreover, it also builds an audience and community centred on the brand, product or theme relevant to a target demographic. 

Traditionally, YouTube has been the primary video platform for video optimisation by digital marketers and content creators to increase visibility on search engines. Equally important is that videos maintain a dominant presence on Google’s search engine results page (SERPs). Nonetheless, Google has recently begun incorporating TikTok videos into its search results, giving more opportunities for video content to garner visibility.

Creator Search Insights

@marketingwithmartyn

TikTok SEO (TikTok Search Engine Optimisation) is trending in 2024 with the new TikTok ‘Creator Search Insights Tool’! 🔥 TikTok will only continue to emerge as a popular platform for search queries as 2 in 5 Americans are currently using TikTok as a search engine! 👆 To use it: Open Tiktok, and search ‘Creator Search Insights’ on a phone or laptop. Press the view button. And you will see a list of keywords and topics that are currently trending. Click on or search for a keyword to learn more! 😇 #tiktokseo #seo #marketing #tiktok #digitalmarketing A Digital Marketing tip by Martyn Snibson Communications

♬ Natural Emotions – Muspace Lofi

TikTok creator search insights, released in March 2024 for selected regions, is a TikTok SEO Tool that gives creators insight into the TikTok topics that people are searching for. It provides a list of trending keywords and topics and the search popularity percentage when researching those keyword ideas.

How to do SEO on TikTok

As many say, search engine optimisation is both an art and a science requiring dynamic creativity, testing and analysis, and the ability to make challenging assumptions to achieve results.

1. Conducting Keyword Research

Firstly, to kickstart our SEO TikTok Organic Strategy, we need to delve into completing some keyword research. This process involves finding out and understanding the types of videos and search patterns trending amongst TikTok users while accessing the competition that those keywords have.

From viral trends on the platform to niche phrases and keywords that target a smaller market. These niches present an opportunity to establish a distinct identity that could separate video content amidst the crowded, saturated “noise” that exists on all social platforms, including TikTok.

Understanding the intent behind a TikTok user’s search query is critical to the success of your TikTok Organic Strategy. These user search intents will generally fall into these four categories:

• Informational Intent – Users seek answers to a question or piece of information. This is the most important intent, as almost three-quarters (73%) of top keyword searches on TikTok consist of Informational search queries.
• Navigational Intent – Users aim to find a particular TikTok account or video.
• Transactional Intent – Users intend to complete a specific action
• Commercial Intent – Users pursue the exploration of brands, products, or services.

At the same time, you may want to consider what other keywords are being searched relative to similar search terms. This can also be known as LSI, standing for Latent Semantic Indexing to be fancy. This approach adds depth to your TikTok organic strategy, ensuring a wide coverage of relevant topics.

2. Where to put SEO Keywords

Improving your SEO Keyword placement on TikTok is essential to enhancing visibility and attracting organic traffic. Once you have gathered your keywords, similar to the SEO strategies employed on a website, the objective here is to integrate keywords into your TikTok video without forcefully inserting them.

On TikTok, the best practice is to incorporate roughly 3-5 relevant keywords and place them in your TikTok content. As a result, it should give your video a natural flow, preventing the appearance of keyword stuffing. Consequently, if it feels like keyword stuffing is present to an audience, it could lead to poor video watch time, causing TikTok’s Algorithm to punish your organic traffic.

Potential solutions for where to put SEO Keywords in your TikTok Videos include:

1. Verbal Integration: Integrating keywords directly into the dialogue or narration within the video itself.
2. Text Overlay: Adding keywords to a video’s user-friendly text or captions to provide context.
3. Video Description: Utilise the video description section to contain target keywords, add further context, and enhance the video’s discoverability on TikTok.

There are TikTok content creators who opt to use hashtags in their video descriptions, and studies, such as those conducted by Hootsuite, indicated that posts with fewer hashtags often achieve greater reach. If you choose to include hashtags, limiting them to 3-5 can be a strategic choice to maximise visibility without negatively impacting user experience.

3. Embed Videos (Optional)

If you have a website, consider including some of your related TikTok videos as part of a microblog on your website. Microblogs are typically shorter-form blog posts that are concisely written to be easily digestible for readers. This trend has gained traction on platforms like LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter). This integration can complement your website’s organic SEO strategy, potentially boosting your TikTok video’s presence on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

4. Checking your rankings for your TikTok SEO Strategy

To become a TikTok SEO mastermind, unleashing your TikTok organic strategy with ease requires much monitoring and tweaking to get it right. Because TikTok Search Engine Optimisation is still relatively new, TikTok SEO Tools for analytics are still being developed for digital marketers and businesses to check performance and rankings. In April 2024, some TikTok SEO tools that could provide basic analytical data include Socialinsider and Hootsuite.

Statement from Martyn Snibson: “In doing some research on the ‘Video Analysis‘ feature on the TikTok app, I came across a cool metric called ‘Traffic Sources‘. This metric gave insights by showing where viewers discover my posts. In many cases, it would be useful to know whether keywords have been effective in a video if high traffic comes directly from a user search.

Frequency Asked Questions (FAQ) About TikTok SEO

Are Views and Likes a Ranking Factor for TikTok SEO?

Views, Likes and follower counts are not direct ranking factors for SEO on TikTok Search. TikTok considers user interaction, video quality, engagement, and the information value of TikTok content the biggest influencers of TikTok SEO Rankings.

Does On-Screen Text that is dragged off the screen affect TikTok views?

It is possible to place text just off the screen by shrinking the text and dragging the text to the bottom of the screen. It is common knowledge that TikTok considers on-screen text/ captions. 

Last modified 30 December 2024 at 11.40am

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