In today’s digital landscape, Google SEO has become incredibly challenging. The competition for prime keywords is fierce, with well-established websites dominating search results. This makes it nearly impossible for newcomers to compete effectively. However, a new frontier is emerging—TikTok. Increasingly, people are turning to TikTok to search for keywords, especially when looking for custom-made products or services. The results you get on TikTok often differ dramatically from those on Google. You’ll notice that TikTok content frequently comes from less famous accounts or companies, yet these accounts receive substantial traffic.
This shift presents a golden opportunity for businesses to start focusing on TikTok SEO, where competition is less stiff, and the cost is significantly lower than Google. If you’re ready to dive into TikTok SEO, here’s what you need to succeed and get your content ranked on the first page of TikTok:
Choose the Right Keywords
The foundation of any successful SEO strategy is choosing the right keywords. They need to be “doable,” profitable, and generate a decent number of searches every month. While this might sound straightforward, it’s where most people go wrong. If you misstep here, you’re likely to lose the SEO race before it even begins.
Even some professionals who offer keyword research services often fail in this area because they don’t use the right tools for the job. So, why are the right keywords so critical? Essentially, every keyword has only 10 search positions worth competing for (in reality, it’s the top 3 positions that capture nearly 70% of the traffic). Once those prime spots are taken, the value of that keyword diminishes significantly.
Big companies, with their deep pockets, will do everything in their power to secure and maintain those top positions, making it almost impossible for newcomers to compete, especially if those companies have been fortifying their positions for years with ongoing content creation, regular updates, in-content SEO, and technical SEO.
But here’s the silver lining: there are thousands of other, relatively smaller keywords in every niche that the big players overlook. These are the opportunities you need to discover through proper keyword research, using the right tools.
Equally Focus on Quality and Quantity
A solid “content score” is how TikTok measures an account’s ability to provide a good user experience. Since TikTok’s primary goal is to ensure that its users have the best browsing experience possible, they will do everything to ensure that accounts with low or moderate content scores don’t get ranked.
To increase your chances of getting ranked, you need to focus on improving your TikTok content’s quality. So, what exactly is good content in TikTok’s eyes? TikTok’s algorithms measure content mathematically, focusing on key engagement metrics such as how many users leave your content after 2 seconds or after 5 seconds.
Many creators make the mistake of posting long content, but the reality is that few users watch until the end. Therefore, TikTok’s algorithms have no way of gauging the quality of your full content. What matters most is the initial engagement—the first 2 seconds and 5 seconds. If you can craft a video that holds users’ attention through those critical first moments, it’s time to think about how to improve the overall visual quality and editing skills of your content.
Consistent and Engaging Content Creation
If you don’t already have a reliable way to produce interesting video content consistently, it’s time to get that sorted out. One effective approach is to leverage AI tools, such as a2e.ai, which can automatically batch-produce short videos. This can streamline your content creation process, ensuring that you always have fresh, engaging material to share.
In-Content SEO: The Power of Keywords in Your Script
A common mistake among new creators is neglecting to intentionally embed search keywords within their video content. They might focus on adding a few keywords in the title or hashtags, but modern recommendation engines like TikTok analyze the audio script of the content itself. The keywords spoken in the video script play a more significant role in SEO than those merely written in the title.
To optimize your content for TikTok SEO, make sure you’re consistently mentioning the keywords you want to rank for throughout your video. This way, TikTok’s algorithm can better understand and rank your content according to the search terms that matter most to your audience.
Batch SEO: Scaling Your Video Production
The visibility of your videos on TikTok is closely tied to the volume of content you produce. The more videos you post, the more exposure your account is likely to receive. However, there are some technical challenges to consider. Based on experience, one TikTok account can only effectively distribute a few new posts per day—typically, more than three new video posts per day become less effective.
To overcome this limitation, consider creating multiple TikTok accounts and using them simultaneously. However, be cautious about posting identical or slightly altered versions of the same video. TikTok imposes strict penalties for publishing duplicate content. This brings us to the next challenge: how to produce a large volume of unique scripts and video content in batch.
Tools like a2e.ai can help you scale your video production efficiently. By using AI avatars and AI-generated scripts optimized for short videos, you can increase your content production by 10x. This allows you to maintain a steady flow of fresh, diverse content across multiple accounts.
Quality, Consistency, and Diversity: The Pillars of TikTok Ranking
TikTok’s ranking system operates primarily on three principles: Quality, Consistency, and Diversity. To maximize your chances of success, avoid duplicating videos by merely applying simple editing tricks like resizing the video, changing fonts, or adjusting timelines. Instead, focus on creating scripts with distinguishable differences for each video.
By ensuring that all of your videos are unique in content and style, TikTok’s algorithms will treat them as distinct candidates for ranking. This approach will help you build a stronger presence on the platform, increasing the likelihood of your content being discovered by a broader audience.
Why Use AI Avatars in Your TikTok SEO Strategy?
Using AI avatars in your TikTok SEO strategy is a smart and cost-effective way to create engaging short videos. Experiene has consistently shown that videos featuring real people tend to hold viewers’ attention longer than those showcasing only products or virtual images. Traditionally, creating a short video with a real person involves a lot of preparation, including hiring actors, setting up scenes, and arranging props. On average, producing such a video can cost around $100, covering actors’ fees, equipment rental, and other expenses.
However, with the advent of modern AI tools, it’s now possible to create highly realistic AI avatars—essentially digital clones of yourself or others—that can appear in short videos, delivering messages with the keywords you want to optimize for. This approach significantly simplifies the video creation process, reducing it primarily to scriptwriting.
Scriptwriting can also be streamlined with AI tools like ChatGPT. While ChatGPT may not provide a script that’s ready for use straight away, it can save you up to 90% of the time you would otherwise spend reworking and refining existing text. By combining AI-driven script creation with AI avatar video production, you can produce SEO-optimized short videos at a rapid pace—up to 5 videos per hour.
Consider the potential impact: if each short video generates approximately 500 views without paid TikTok promotion, you could achieve around 2,500 views for every hour of work. When you compare the cost of an hour’s work to the exposure your content receives, it’s clear that this approach offers a compelling value proposition for most businesses.
FYI
When hiring an tiktok content professional to help you with any of the above, make sure that they have been in the tiktok SEO space a long time (as we have). And have tons of experience to do a decent enough job. We have been in the Tiktok shorts SEO Circuit for 3+ years and have implemented successful (and highly profitable) digital marketing campaigns over the years for thousands of businesses.