Marketers have long wanted to utilise TikTok data to improve the SEO of their videos and utilise the data to improve the visibility and subsequent performance of their videos.
The Search Insights tool you can access directly through TikTok by searching “search insights” on the TikTok search bar and then viewing the Creator Search Insights through there. In this blog post we will break down how to use it and what it is, as well as how this can change your TikTok game.
When you access the Creator Search Insights tool on TikTok, you will be served a page that looks like this:
You then click on “View” to be served a page that shows the following:
From here, the tool then allows you to see what different search topics are trending currently, tailored to wither your own content or in general, and allowing you to search different keywords and topics.
Starting with a recommended topic, when clicking you can see data around how that topic has been searched over the past 12 months, with a graph showing whether the topic is increasing or decreasing in popularity over time, as well as showing related videos to help provide inspiration:
If you then click on the “related searches” tab, it will show you a list of related keywords and topics that are relevant to that topic, based on search behaviour:
This will allow you as a creator to find common interests aswell as hashtag ideas and opportunities to create new content for a related target audience.
With the Creator Insights tool, it also shows you content gaps. This allows creators to use this search functionality to find topics that users are searching for relevant to the type of content that they are creating, but that their content doesn’t currently cover.
Similarly to how SEO tools such as Semrush can identify keyword and content gaps and opportunities based on current keyword targeting, this section of the tool acts similarly, by showcasing what different search topics relevant to a creator can create content around, allowing them to be more visible on TikTok.
What about if you want to search a new topic on TikTok? That can be done through the platform too. Simply search any keyword or topic and again it will show the variation of keywords/different topics and their search popularity.
If you search for something more niche you might find keywords with lower search popularity, but these can be utilised too.
For example, when searching “Loewe”, one of the hottest fashion brands right now in 2024, we can see different topic and keyword variations with lower search popularity:
Now, just because it has lower search popularity doesn’t mean creating content around this won’t help grow your engagement and platform.
In SEO, we often target keywords with lower search volumes as they are less competitive, meaning websites with domains that aren’t as strong as others can compete through targeting longer-tail or more specific keywords.
The same principle applies here. Typically if a keyword has less search popularity it will have less content created around it too, although there is still search interest there. This means it might be easier to be discoverable, especially for smaller creators, to target these topics and keywords and increase their visibility across TikTok.
To summarise, the TikTok Creator Insights Tool allows you to understand the popularity behind different keywords and search topics and utilise that data to inform what content to create as well as keywords to target through both the video itself but also the description and hashtags.
Although the data could be more comprehensive to give increased insights, for example rough search volume data by country, similar to SEO tools such as Semrush, then that data could be further utilised to create TikTok content with better targeting, however this is definitely a step forward, especially for marketers and creators, to really try and utilise data to increase their TikTok presence.
