Find your TikTok audience with keyword research

With over a billion active users worldwide, TikTok has become an essential platform for businesses, influencers, and content creators to engage with their audience.

Like any other search engine, TikTok relies on keywords to drive content discovery. This means that by including the right keywords in your TikTok videos, you can ensure your content is pushed to your target audience.

In this article we discuss the importance of TikTok keyword research, share how to find top keywords, and how to use them effectively.

What are TikTok Keywords?

TikTok keywords are the specific words or phrases that users search for within the platform. These keywords can relate to trending topics, niche interests, challenges, or product categories. Keywords thus play a dual role: they help users find relevant content but also help creators by making their content discoverable.

Keywords are often embedded in video titles, descriptions, hashtags, and even within the content itself, such as through text overlays or spoken words. You can see below some example videos that are optimised for SEO and include relevant keywords.

Understanding and leveraging these keywords is critical for increasing your visibility on the platform.

Why Are Keywords Important on TikTok?

Keywords on TikTok are fundamental to content discovery and algorithm optimisation. When users type in search queries, the TikTok's algorithm matches the content with relevant keywords to display videos that closely align with user intent. By using the right keywords, creators can significantly increase their chances of being found by their target audience either through the For You Page (FYP) or as search results.

Key benefits of using TikTok keywords include:

• Increased Discoverability: By using relevant keywords, your videos are more likely to appear in search results and on the For You page of your target audience.
• Targeting the Right Audience: Keywords help TikTok understand what your video is about and show it to users interested in that topic.
• Boosting Engagement: Keywords can lead to higher engagement as your content reaches the audience most likely to interact with it.

How to Find Keywords for TikTok

Finding the right keywords for TikTok involves a combination of research and analytics. Here are some effective in-app tools and methods to discover relevant keywords:

• Analyse Competitors Content Type a keyword in the TikTok search bar and check out the top 10 ranking videos. Pay attention to what keywords, hashtags, and phrases successful competitors in your niche are using.
• TikTok Keyword Insights Tool TikTok's own keyword insights tool is a platform-specific feature that helps creators explore trending keywords and content gaps. It’s a great resource for identifying new opportunities for content creation and optimisation.
• TikTok Search Suggestions After searching for a keyword, TikTok shows related search terms under “other searched for”. This provides valuable insights into what users are searching for around your topic.

Once you have identified all relevant keywords you should proceed to the analytics stage. Here you should consider metrics such as search volume and keyword competitiveness.

• Search volume tells you how many people are looking for a specific keyword.
• Competitiveness tells you how difficult it is for a video to rank for that keyword. This typically is based on how many other videos are ranking for that keyword and how high the engagement rate of those videos was. The more high-performing videos exist for a given keyword, the more difficult it is to rank for it.

For your next video, you want to find keywords that have high search volume and low competitiveness as these represent the topics that a lot of people are searching for, but for which only few quality videos are ranking. These keywords indicate content gaps.

A content gap is an area where the current supply of content doesn’t fully satisfy the demand from users. By identifying these gaps through TikTok keyword research, you can create highly relevant content that addresses unmet needs, providing a significant opportunity to stand out on the platform.

Unfortunately TikTok does not provide direct insights into these metrics. However, we can get this data for you at ShortFormData.

How to Use Keywords on TikTok

Once you have found all the relevant keywords for your next video, you need to understand how to use them in practice. Using keywords on TikTok effectively can help boost your content's performance and reach a larger audience. Here’s how to optimise your content with keywords:

Optimise Video Titles

Although TikTok videos don’t have official titles like YouTube, the text overlay on your videos can act as a title for the algorithm. Ensure that it includes one or two primary keywords.

Write Effective Descriptions

Video descriptions are often overlooked, but they play a key role in SEO. Include relevant keywords that describe your content and match user search intent.

Use Keywords in Hashtags

Hashtags on TikTok function similarly to keywords. Use a blend of trending hashtags and niche-specific hashtags to enhance discoverability.

Incorporate Keywords in Video Content

Spoken and written words within your videos are both used by the TikTok’s algorithm to understand your content. By using your target keywords naturally in the dialogue and text overlay, you increase the chances of your content being ranked for those terms.

Engage with your Audience in the Comments

Including keywords in the comment section when engaging with your audience will give you a small but notable SEO boost.

How to Measure Your Search Performance on TikTok

While there is no advanced analytics in place for TikTok content just yet, you can rely on traffic sources to track the performance of your SEO optimised videos.

Most users will have the majority of their traffic coming from the ‘FYP’ and a smaller percentage coming from ‘Search’. The goal is to increase the percentage of users who find your content through their search results.

Keep track of how these metrics change over time and identify which of your videos get the most search traffic.

Conclusion

By following these guidelines and experimenting with SEO you will soon learn how you can best optimise your content for your target audience.