9. Approach your Video with an SEO Mindset

While TikTok is a visual platform, optimizing your content for discoverability is essential. Use relevant hashtags, compelling captions, and keywords that reflect what your video is about. Research trending hashtags and incorporate them strategically to increase the likelihood of your videos being seen by a broader audience.  

To gain a better understanding of search engine results, keywords, and how they work together to get your content in front of potential customers, you can check out our Intro to Keyword Research course! A lot of the same principles can be applied to TikTok! 

You can do a simple TikTok search to discover what users are searching for. Simply, type in some keywords or phrases that would be relevant to include in the caption of your video, and you’ll see a list of frequent searches begin to populate below. It’s important to experiment with both broad and specific phrases, to see which versions of those phrases are ranking higher within the drop down. You can include those words or phrases in your caption and capture users searches. 

When you go to caption your video, you can click on “#hashtags” to begin typing out the hashtags you may want to add to your caption. You’ll see similar hashtags populating below with the number of posts currently using that hashtag. As you can imagine, you’ll want to add both specific and broad or trending hashtags to your video. Understanding which hashtags to use will require you to apply some fundamental knowledge of keyword volume. 

Essentially, more vague or trending hashtags with a higher number of associated posts are more popularly used hashtags. However, the video feed for those hashtags is going to be very saturated. Unless you are receiving a large amount of views, it would be difficult for your post to rank in TikTok’s search results among so many others. More specific hashtags may have less search volume and videos associated with them, but this means your post would have a better chance at standing out.

Finally, consider creating a specific and relevant hashtag for your brand that you use on all of your content. This way, people that are using TikTok’s search function to find your account or posts will be served your content!