TikTok SEO: How to Optimize for Search & the For You Page

TikTok SEO is about optimizing your videos to rank higher in search results on the platform.

Just like you would optimize your website content to improve your Google rankings, you can use various tactics to boost your video rankings on TikTok’s search page and the For You Page (FYP).

The TikTok algorithm considers several factors when ranking videos, like keyword usage and user interactions.

However, good TikTok SEO doesn’t just grow your visibility on the platform.

Well-optimized content and profiles can show up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) too.

By implementing SEO best practices for search engines and TikTok, you can increase the likelihood of your content appearing in online searches across multiple search engines.

In fact, TikTok videos can now show up in video searches alongside YouTube videos:

(Although YouTube videos are still BY FAR the most common video results.)

While showing up for search queries is great, the ultimate goal of TikTok SEO is to end up on the FYPs of as many TikTok users in your target audience as possible.

Because this is where your target audience spends most of their time on the app.

The FYP is TikTok’s dynamic homepage that constantly updates to provide users with new content every time they swipe. Content that the algorithm thinks will appeal to them appears on their feed without them even having to search.

Why Should You Care About TikTok SEO?

People spend an average of 95 minutes per day on TikTok. A full half hour longer than they spend on Instagram.

On top of that, Google’s Senior Vice President, Prabhakar Raghavan, stated that almost 40% of the younger generation are turning to TikTok and Instagram for many of their search queries.

That means TikTok is becoming the go-to platform for more and more people (especially those between ages 18 and 24). As such, it’s the perfect platform for anyone targeting a younger audience.

Here are three more reasons you should care about TikTok SEO:

• Engagement: Good TikTok SEO improves your chances of engaging users with your content. This is great for boosting visibility and improving your profile’s standing in the algorithm’s eyes, leading to a snowball effect as engagement can also affect your rankings (more on that soon).
• Audience: By optimizing your profile and content to match your target audience’s search queries, you improve your chances of reaching people who care about what you’re offering. Leading to better results for your business.
• Reach: Higher engagement with your videos through liking, commenting, saving, or sharing can increase the likelihood of your content being included on FYPs. Helping you reach a much wider audience.

Understanding TikTok Search

Before we dive into the ranking factors, we need to understand how users find content on TikTok. We’ve already mentioned the For You Page a few times, but let’s clarify how this works in TikTok SEO.

The platform’s discovery can be broken up into two parts: active search and content discovery.

Active search is when a user searches for content related to your topic using the search bar. This is where well-optimized videos stand a better chance of competing with content that’s getting a lot of engagement.

Content discovery refers to the videos that show up on a user’s FYP. Users aren’t actively looking for a topic but rather using the platform for enjoyment.

In these instances, it doesn’t really matter how well-optimized for search a video is. The main things that matter are what the video is about and whether it aligns with a user’s interests.

If you want to be successful on TikTok, you need to optimize your videos for both discovery methods.

How to Track Search Traffic on TikTok

We’ll talk more about tracking your SEO progress later in this guide. But it’s worth noting now that you can track how much traffic your videos get and where that traffic comes from.

This makes it possible to see EXACTLY how well your TikTok SEO strategies are working.

You can see how people are finding your videos:

The main “traffic sources” include:

• The “For You” feed
• The “Following” feed
• Sound, profile, and search pages
• Direct messages

You can even see which search terms people are using to find your videos:

This data is incredibly powerful.

Why?

Because it’ll show you whether you’re getting video views from the keywords you’re optimizing your profile and videos for (more on that below).

How Does the TikTok Algorithm Work?

To keep the platform relevant and engaging, TikTok constantly recommends new videos to users through their For You Page.

The type of video content it shows depends entirely on individual interests. Essentially, the algorithm determines the videos you see based on how you engage with the content you watch.

If your content lands on a For You Page, it means that TikTok has determined you’re producing relevant content that the specific user would want to engage with.

TikTok has been relatively quiet about exactly how it ranks content. But it has been open about some ranking factors its algorithm uses when showing content on FYPs.

While this is useful on its own, we can assume the platform likely uses some of the same factors for ranking content in TikTok search results.

TikTok Ranking Factors

Here are the three main factors that affect how TikTok decides to show content on For You Pages:

Video Information

TikTok considers what each video is about in order to understand what it contains.

How much information? Here’s a breakdown:

• Video visual: This includes things like creative formats, filters, CapCut templates, and photo carousels
• Audio of the video: The actual words spoken during the video as well as any additional audio (e.g., a cat meowing)
• The textual elements used in the video: These can be in the form of subtitles, emojis, or video titles
• Captions and hashtags: Relevant keywords used in captions and hashtags help to identify what the content is about
• The use of TikTok sounds: Whether the video uses a specific audio clip or trending sound/song

Video Quality (Engagement)

The TikTok algorithm places a lot of weight on the type of engagement users have with content.

It’s also similar to YouTube’s algorithm in the sense that it also takes into account how much of a video a user actually watches. The longer someone sticks around, the more likely they’re genuinely interested in the content.

TikTok also takes into account the following interactions:

• Video comments
• Likes and shares
• Follows gained from the video
• Videos users flag as not interested

Individual User Interactions

Whether or not your videos show up in content discovery will also depend on individual user interactions.

These include:

• Videos the user likes and shares
• Accounts they follow
• Comments they post
• Videos they save
• Creators they hide
• Videos they flag as “Not Interested”
• The amount of time they spend watching a video
• Engagement with the accounts they follow (i.e., do they scroll past the account’s videos or regularly watch them?)

On top of this, the platform also considers the individual user’s device and account settings. (Although these don’t carry as much weight as other factors.)

These are broken down into:

• Device type: Whether it’s a tablet, desktop, or mobile phone and which model it is
• Country setting: Users are more likely to see content from people in their country
• Language preferences: Users will mainly see content in their preferred language

Which Ranking Factors Matter Most?

TikTok SEO Tips to Boost Your Reach

By creating well-optimized TikTok content, you can improve your visibility both on the platform and on search engines like Google. It’s like the TikTok equivalent of On-Page SEO.

Let’s take a look at the best ways to improve your TikTok SEO:

1. Get to Know Your Audience Better

If you don’t know your audience well, you won’t know how to appeal to them. And if you don’t appeal to their interests, you won’t engage them.

And if you don’t engage them, you won’t convert them into followers/customers. (And we know engagement affects your rankings on the platform too.)

How do you truly understand your audience?

One way is by looking at the content they’re engaging with and what they’re saying in comments. Both on your videos and other people’s (like your competitors).

But what’s the BEST way to really understand what your audience wants?

By engaging with them directly.

Engage with Your Audience

TikTok works hard to try and create communities, which means your work doesn’t stop when you upload your videos.

You have to engage with your audience too.

Here are some of the ways you can do this:

• Encourage users to comment on your post, and then connect with your audience by replying to comments they leave on your videos. You can even reply with a video.
• Comment and like other creators’ content. This lets you “piggyback” off of their following as you can appear in their video’s comments.
• Like and save relevant posts to make your own FYP show videos related to your niche. This is a great opportunity to see what kind of content is popular with your target audience.
• Try live streaming with the “Go Live” function. This is a great way to engage with your audience in real time. Showing some behind-the-scenes activities helps users connect with you more.
• Create polls or quizzes, and ask your audience questions. This doesn’t just get you useful engagement for the algorithm, as you can also use this as research to find out what your target audience wants to see.

Find TikTok Sub-Communities

There are various sub-communities on TikTok that you can join to benefit from the sense of community they foster.

For example, the reading community has #BookTok, which has exploded on TikTok and into the shelves of bookstores. But you can also find #CarTok, #FarmTok, and many more.

One of the best ways to find these communities is by actually engaging with the platform, but you can also do so through keyword research.

2. Perform Keyword Research Specifically for TikTok

Keyword research is a core part of any SEO strategy – and TikTok SEO is no different.

Keyword research helps you find popular topics to create content around and uncovers valuable keywords you can use in your titles and captions.

As a result, you can boost your discoverability, engagement, and growth on TikTok with a solid keyword research strategy.

So, how do you find the right keywords to target? We’ll guide you through a few methods below:

Keyword Research Within TikTok

You can discover relevant keywords and hashtags for your niche by searching for them directly on TikTok:

If you want to find more related keywords, you can try the “alphabet soup” method.

This method starts with searching for your focus keyphrase, and then working your way through the alphabet.

So, if you searched for “marketing,” you’d search for “marketing a” then “marketing b” and so on, and see what useful keywords you can find:

You can also look for more long-tail search terms by adding different words and phrases before/after the term.

Like this:

Here’s a quick list of some other prompts you could try:

• How (keyword)
• How to (keyword)
• How do (keyword)
• Why do (keyword)
• What (keyword)
• Do (keyword)
• Does a (keyword)
• Best (keyword) for
• Best for (keyword)
• Top (keyword)
• Top 10 (keyword)
• Best (keyword)
• (Keyword) or
• (Keyword) vs
• (Keyword) review

Another way to conduct keyword research within TikTok is by searching for hashtags. Just enter your keyword like before, but when you hit search, scroll along to the right to find the “Hashtags” option.

You’ll be able to see how many posts there are for each hashtag. Which gives you a decent indication of how popular a topic is.

We’ve also stumbled onto a dedicated sub-community with #marketingtiktok.

This method is a great way to find content ideas within your niche, and see what’s popular with your target audience.

Another great place to find keywords is by using TikTok’s “Others searched for” feature.

Similar to Google’s “People Also Ask” SERP feature, this suggests similar topics that might be relevant based on your search query.

Keyword Research in a Tool

While doing your keyword research in TikTok has benefits, it can be rather time-consuming.

SEO tools like Semrush can help speed up the process. While these tools can’t show you data for TikTok specifically, they’re still great for finding what people are looking for online. And they can give you a lot of useful content ideas too.

To start, just enter your keyword into the Keyword Magic Tool. For example, we’re going to search for “laptop reviews”:

You’ll then get thousands of keyword ideas.

Along with useful metrics like the search intent, volume, keyword difficulty, and more.

Looking at the results, you can see that there are over 40K keywords related to this topic, with over 150K searches happening per month (known as search volume).

(Remember: this is the search volume on Google, not TikTok. But while trends and user behavior differ between the platforms, this can still serve as a useful guide and starting point for your keyword research.)

There’s no doubt that this is a popular topic, but the competition (indicated by keyword difficulty/KD%) is very high for a lot of the topics.

We need to look for keywords we actually stand a chance at ranking for. This will also help us narrow down the list of 40K keywords to something more manageable.

To do this, just adjust the “KD%” filter to only show keywords that are easier to rank for:

Now we’ve narrowed it down to 444 keywords. That’s much more manageable.

But it’s still a lot, so let’s cut things down a little more.

Now we’re going to adjust the search volume to make sure we’re only left with keywords that people are interested in:

We’re left with only 69 keywords. MUCH more manageable than 40K.

In particular, “best gaming laptop under 2000” catches our eye, because it has decent search volume and a low KD.

Let’s now check TikTok to see if there is evidence that people are searching for this kind of keyword on the platform:

As we can see, the top three results have between 16.7K and 32.7K views—so it’s safe to say this topic is pretty popular.

Now it’s time to repeat this process to find more topics to create content for. Head back to the Keyword Magic Tool, look for more topics that sound interesting within your narrowed-down list, and cross-reference them on TikTok.

Keyword Research in TikTok’s Keyword Insights Tool

Another way to find keywords is by using TikTok’s Keyword Insight Tool. It’s designed for TikTok ads, but it’s a pretty nifty way to find keyword ideas.

This tool pulls data on keywords that it’s extracted from audio, text overlay, and ad text from the top-performing TikTok ads.

While these keyword insights are targeted toward advertisers, they also offer a wealth of platform-specific information if you want to grow organically.

There are some filters you can play with, including:

• Region: Lets you filter for your target country.
• Industry: Allows you to filter by industry/niche.
• Objective: Lets you decide what kind of outcome you want to get from that keyword. This includes things like video views, reach, and lead generation.
• Keyword type: This is sort of like search intent. Keyword type is used to identify why the user is searching for the keyword. This includes things like pain points, selling points, and products.
• Last 7 days: This is how far back you want to go. This filter can go back 7, 30, or 120 days.

Let’s say we want to analyze the keyword “laptop.” We’re going to filter for:

• Searches in the United States
• Within the “Tech & Electronics” industry
• With a “Traffic” objective
• And a “Products” keyword type over the last 7 days

There’s only one result, but it has a ton of useful information.

(We’ll have to scroll to the right to see all of the results.)

You’ll then see metrics like:

• Popularity: The number of ad creatives that are using this keyword. For this result, it’s 24. The “Popularity” metric is the way you measure how difficult the keyword is. The higher the popularity, the more difficult it would be to rank for.
• Popularity Change: The number of ad creatives that have started using this keyword over the last 7 days.
• Click-through rate (CTR): This tells me what percentage of people who saw the ad clicked through.
• Impressions: This tells the number of times the ad has been displayed on screen.
• 6s View Rate: This tells what percentage of people have watched at least 6 seconds of the video.

If we want some real-world examples of how the keyword is being used, we can click on the “Details” button in the “Actions” section:

Clicking on this takes us to the following page:

From here, we can see:

• Keyword phrase: Keywords used in the caption and hashtags
• Most used as: Where the keyword was used in the video itself (text overlays, voiceovers, etc.)
• CTR: The CTR percentage for that specific ad
• Related videos: Similar content to the specific video

We can also use this tool to explore related keywords and hashtags. All we have to do is scroll down to the bottom:

These keywords and hashtags are the ones that are currently being used most frequently in TikTok content.

If we select “Breakout”, we’ll see a list of related keywords that are rapidly growing in popularity:

You’ll see that many of these related keywords aren’t all that useful. Like “get yours today” and “search and find here.”

But this can still be a useful way to get keyword ideas.

How to Use SEO Keywords in TikTok Videos

Now that we’ve covered how to do keyword research, let’s explore how to implement these keywords.

Great places to include your main keyword are:

• As native TikTok text throughout your video
• In your audio (say your main keyword at least once, preferably near the start of the video)
• In your video caption
• As a hashtag (e.g., #laptopreviews)
• In your thumbnail text
• In the names of your original sounds

3. Optimize your Profile

While it might not be the first thing on your mind, optimizing your TikTok profile should be a priority. Your profile is a direct reflection of your brand, so you need to make sure it’s communicating the right message.

Plus:

• A more appealing profile is more engaging for users
• It provides extra opportunities to incorporate your keywords

It’s also super easy to do. Let’s start with your profile picture:

Profile Picture

Your profile photo is a huge part of your social media identity. It’s often the first thing a user sees, so it’s worth putting a bit of thought into.

If you’re a company or a brand, you should upload a clear photo of your logo or something that people associate with your brand:

If you’re a solo creator, you should try to use something that shows your face clearly so that people can easily identify you:

Your profile picture should be 200×200 pixels, in a 1:1 format. Use bright colors and make your profile picture easy to identify at a glance.

Bio

Your bio is the perfect opportunity to sell yourself a little bit. But it’s limited to 80 characters, so you’ve got to keep things short and sweet.

Here we can see that Yoast has quickly and clearly communicated what it does (your go-to resource for everything SEO). They’ve also used two keywords as hashtags to stand out and make them easier to find through searches (#SEO and #SEOForEveryone).

Your bio is also a great place to link to your other social media accounts. And if you’ve got a business account, you can add a no-follow link back to your website.

Handle

Your handle should be short and memorable. You could make it your name, or a feature you want to stand out for:

4. Optimize for TikTok’s Search Bar

TikTok categorizes videos largely based on video information. More specifically, keywords used in the video text or caption.

During active search, you’ll see a “find related content” search bar at the top of videos. This is designed to help users find similar content.

To help make content easier to discover for users, some TikTok videos on the FYP have auto-populated search bars at the bottom as well. Whether it appears or not will depend on the type of content you’re watching and whether the algorithm thinks the search bar will be useful.

For example, if we watch a video on our FYP featuring a laptop review, we get a search bar at the bottom saying “want to buy a laptop.”

To help make content easier to discover for users, some TikTok videos on the FYP have auto-populated search bars at the bottom as well. Whether it appears or not will depend on the type of content you’re watching and whether the algorithm thinks the search bar will be useful.

For example, if we watch a video on our FYP featuring a laptop review, we get a search bar at the bottom saying “want to buy a laptop”.

So, why should you care?

Simple: these are two more places you could potentially show up and reach your audience.

It’s important to note that you have no control over what goes into the search bar. This is entirely determined by TikTok’s algorithm.

But the more optimized your TikTok account and videos are, the better chance you have of appearing in relevant search results for people when they use these features.

5. Keep Up with Trends in Your Industry

Using popular trends in your niche is a great way to find content ideas for videos more likely to gain traction. Trends are also an excellent source of inspiration.

Leverage Trending Hashtags

TikTok uses hashtags to categorize content, trends, and challenges. Because of TikTok’s focus on trends, hashtags can sometimes help you get rapid, short-term visibility.

But it’s important to know which ones to use to get your content in front of the right audience. This means you shouldn’t just focus on the most popular hashtags, but also look for trending keywords related to your niche.

You can use the hashtags you found in your keyword research. Or you can use TikTok’s hashtag tool to find relevant trending hashtags in your industry.

Use Trending Sounds

A key part of any strong TikTok SEO strategy involves using trending songs and sounds.

TikTok found that 68% of people were more likely to remember brands that used songs they like.

You can find trending sounds to use in your videos by searching for “trending” on TikTok, and then tapping on the “Sounds” section:

6. Produce High-Quality Content

No matter how well you optimize your content, if your videos aren’t engaging and entertaining, viewers will likely not want to watch many of them.

Here are some things to keep in mind when creating high-quality videos:

Make Your Content Visually Appealing

As TikTok is a visual platform, you need to use high-quality images, videos, and audio.

You don’t need high-end film equipment to nail this these days. Your average smartphone camera is good enough to capture high-quality video.

Plus, TikTok is a vertical media. The app was essentially built for phone filming.

But by using TikTok’s built-in editing tools, you can find ways to make your content even more visually appealing while creating engaging videos. You can add filters, text overlays, and effects to make your brand stand out.

Collaborate with Influencers

Partnering with influencers is a great way to get a headstart in your niche. It won’t affect your SEO directly, but collabs can increase your visibility and potentially result in higher levels of engagement.

Since TikTok creators are already showing up in search results for users you’re looking to reach, it’s a powerful opportunity to piggyback on their success.

If you’re looking to find influencers in your niche, check out the TikTok Creator Marketplace.

How to Track Your SEO Results with TikTok Analytics

If you want to grow on any social media platform, you need a way to track your progress. By using TikTok Analytics, you can get insights into audience behavior, figure out what content is working for you, and identify ways you can improve.

If you have a TikTok business account, you can track your analytics by hovering over the user icon in the top-right corner of the homepage and clicking “Business Suite.”

You’ll land on a homepage that looks like this:

In the “Analytics” section, you’ll see a quick view of your profile’s metrics. These include:

• New followers
• New likes
• New profile visits
• New video views

You can also choose the time period you want to view. You’ll see info within each widget about how each metric changed during the selected period.

Analytics Overview

If you click on “Overview” you’ll see a more in-depth overview of your profile’s metrics.

These include:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Conversions
• Followers

This section works in the same way the analytics page works when it comes to date ranges. So you can track your TikTok SEO efforts over time.

Audience Insights

If you click “Audience” you can look at the demographics data. In other words: learn more about the people watching your videos.

Understanding who your followers are and the way they interact with your videos is a great way to guide your content strategy and figure out what you should be doing more of.

At the top of the page, you can see:

• New followers
• Total number of followers: (his only becomes visible once you reach 100 followers)
• Reached audience
• Engaged audience

This tab also tracks your follower count over time and the trend of your account’s follower growth. You can use this data to analyze which content and SEO strategies were the most effective for gaining new followers.

Next, you’ll find a breakdown of your followers by gender, age, country/region, and city. This lets you build a fairly detailed profile of your target audience.

Armed with this info, you can focus on creating content tailored to the specific demographic your content is already reaching. This could help to improve user engagement and your content’s visibility.

(Or, if this data doesn’t match up with your target audience, it can indicate that you might need to change tactics.)

Below these demographic insights, you’ll find the activity graph. This tells you when your followers are most active on the platform in terms of days of the week and hours of the day.

This data can be SUPER useful for understanding when the best times are to post new videos.

For example, let’s say you notice your followers are most active at 1pm on weekdays.

You could schedule your posts for this time to appear in your followers’ feeds when they’re most active. This might make it more likely for them to engage with your posts, and it should increase the visibility of your videos among your target audience.

Video Metrics

To see the metrics for each of your videos, click the “Video” tab on the menu.

Here, you’ll see more specific information about how your content published in the last seven days is performing. This section will help you discover which posts are performing best while also tracking your reach across TikTok.

First, you’ll see a list of your content with a few metrics like the number of views, likes, and shares for each video.

Clicking on a video lets you see its performance data. Near the top of the page, you’ll see:

• The total audience reach for the video
• The percentage of viewers who watched the whole video
• The average time users spent watching it
• How many people viewed your profile after watching the video

Scroll down, and you’ll see conversion information. This tells you how many viewers engaged with your website link or phone number.

TikTok Analytics also provides you with an “Audience Retention” graph. This shows the points in the video where most users stopped watching and how many stuck around until the end.

(You get similar data on your YouTube channel.)

For this video, most viewers stopped watching after around two seconds. One possible reason for this could be that the thumbnail and description didn’t accurately reflect the content of the video.

If users click on your video based on the thumbnail or description but don’t get what they expect, they’re likely to stop watching fairly quickly.

To identify the issue, we could edit our thumbnail and description, and then check the retention rate for the video after another few days. If it’s improved, then it could be a sign that this was the problem.

Monitor and Adapt Your TikTok SEO Strategy for the Best Results

Testing and iterating based on data is a key part of any SEO strategy—not just on TikTok.

In fact, it’s a key part of any strategy, not just SEO.

Check out these two free resources to improve your social media strategy across multiple platforms (including TikTok):

• Easy Social Media Audit Template: Use this to take stock of your current social media presence and analyze your competitors. You’ll use this to find key areas to improve.
• Social Media Strategy Template: Now that you understand your current social media standing, use our free template to build on it. Use it to set clear goals, further analyze your competitors, and understand what you need to do with your social channels to grow your business.