Use TikTok Search Data to Source Trending Keywords

Finding keywords to target is always a tricky task. The easiest and most marketer-friendly tools are fine for a lot of bulk keyword research, but they're also, you know, the easiest and most marketer-friendly tools. That means everyone is using them, your competitors are getting the same data, and competition is on-rails.

On the other hand, using off-the-beaten-path resources can give you some very interesting options. Great data your competitors aren't using, insights to target audiences no one else thinks to reach, or trends that are about to pop off are all within your grasp.

One option you may not have considered before is TikTok. Yes, I know; the Gen-Z video network is immensely popular and very contentious, both with "back in my day" curmudgeons who secretly just miss Vine and with nationalistic weirdos who think it's some kind of propaganda platform any different from the ones we grow ourselves at home.

The thing about TikTok is that it's useful for more than just marketing on TikTok. A lot of marketers view it as an all-or-nothing platform. Either you get into making short-form videos and hope the algorithm picks you up, or you leave it to the kids to do their sea shanties and political activism while you focus on more slow-paced media sources.

That's the wrong way to look at it.

TikTok is, yes, a fast-paced video platform aimed primarily at younger generations, but there are plenty of older influencers making content and plenty of older people using it too. I would argue, though, that that doesn't matter. Even if the app were solely focused on younger people, it's still a valuable source of information.

TikTok is an ever-churning sea of potential trends waiting to happen. You've seen the power of a "TikTok challenge" taking over the entire internet for a week, right? The same thing happens with more subtle trends, whether it's influencers recommending products, the discussion of certain topics, or just the sudden popularity of certain people.

All of this is an opportunity for you. If you can tap into this wellspring of trending data, you have the potential to capture interest as it happens rather than react to trends as so many other people do.

Now for the good news: TikTok actually makes this surprisingly easy for once.

What You Get Out of TikTok Keyword Research

So, what are the sources of value you can extract from TikTok using SEO research and keyword harvesting?

The first source of value is, of course, keywords. Keywords you can use for marketing in a wide range of ways, from producing your own videos to targeting content to identifying the general user intent behind certain topics among the TikTok audience. As we all know, the more keyword data you have, the more options you have for creating content surrounding those keywords, and the more flexible your marketing can be.

Another source of value you tap into is audience insights for an audience you might not normally reach. I'm speaking primarily about the younger generations. It's notoriously difficult to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha (the oldest of whom are starting to reach age 16 and will be leveraging their purchasing power soon). These people are somewhat distrustful of Google and are increasingly turning to sites like TikTok for information.

Beyond that, you can also see the sparks of trending topics before they're a blip anywhere else. Tools like Google Trends are reactive and somewhat slow. Tools like Glimpse Trends use more data sources and speed up recognition of trends, but they can still lag behind. Getting data directly from TikTok can show you things that are trending before they surge into the wider internet, letting you capitalize more quickly.

Convinced? Let's talk about the different data sources you can use from TikTok and what kind of keyword information you can get from them.

How to Get Keyword Data from TikTok

There are a bunch of different ways to get keyword data from TikTok, so let's talk about them.

Option 1: Search Autocomplete

Just like on Google, when you type something into the search bar on TikTok, it will give you predictions on what it thinks you're typing, recent searches, and search suggestions.

This is functionally identical to how Google and a lot of other search engines work these days.

Remember how a common strategy years ago was to go to Google, type in a keyword, and then type in a letter and scrape what comes up? "Content marketing a," "content marketing b," "content marketing c," all the way down. Well, you can do the same thing with TikTok.

Much like how people made tools to scrape Google automatically, people have also made tools to scrape TikTok automatically. Keyword Tool works wonders and can cover everything from Google and Bing to Amazon to Instagram to Pinterest to TikTok. It'll give you a wealth of keyword information, along with data like the search volume, trending direction, TikTok CPC, and competition estimates for those keywords.

Note that this strategy, if you're doing it manually, tends to work better in the app than in the web interface. You'll run into that a lot.

Option 2: TikTok Keyword Insights

In a nod to the fact that people are using TikTok for business and marketing, the company has created a keyword insights tool in their creative center for content creators. You don't need any special paid account or anything to access this, but you do need to use the desktop version of the creative center to access the tool.

To access the tool, log into the creative center. Click on the Inspiration tab and choose Keyword Insights, and that brings you to their keyword insights tool. Here, you can use a search bar to search for specific keywords or use a filter to dig for keywords in categories.

This tool offers data visualization, tables, and even a word cloud if you want to get more free-form inspiration that way. You can sort keywords by their ranking and see details on the keywords, all in this menu.

It's very important to know what kind of data this is.

What do I mean? This isn't organic data; this is PPC data. It's similar to Google's Keyword Planner, and how it uses Google PPC data instead of organic search data, which can skew some information. The most popular keywords in TikTok keyword insights are keywords that are used in TikTok ads more often. That can include in ad text, in voiceover, in text overlay, and in targeting.

So, this data is useful to see what professional users and businesses are using to target TikTok audiences, but it's not reflective of what TikTok audiences are actually searching, just what marketers assume they're searching. This distinction is small but important.

When you look at the keyword data, you get a bunch of PPC-relevant information:

• The keyword
• The popularity (how often the keyword is used in ad copy)
• The percent change in popularity recently
• The click-through rate and conversion rate percentages for the keyword
• The cost per action for the keyword
• The total cost spent on that keyword
• The number of impressions the keyword receives
• The 6s rate (the percentage of viewers who watched at least six seconds of the ad)
• Likes, shares, and comments on the ad videos

You also get a link to an insights page for the keyword. This gives you examples of ads, including the keyword descriptions used, where the keyword is used, the CTR of the example, and related videos. You also get related keywords and related hashtags.

All of this can be extremely useful, but it's hard to get specific reports out of it, so you're basically going to have to go down a rabbit hole and explore. And again, remember that this is PPC data, so if you're going to use it for organic marketing, remember it might not be fully reflective of what's going to work organically.

Option 3: View TikTok Trends

Another resource in the TikTok creative center is the trends monitor. This is basically Google trends but for TikTok. It shows what is trending, with a few filters you can use to narrow it down.

• Hashtags, which lets you see the most popular hashtags trending in your chosen period.
• Songs, which shows you the trending songs used in the back of TikTok videos.
• Creators, which can show you up-and-coming influencers.
• Videos, which shows you the most popular recent videos on the site.

For hashtags, you can sort by industry, choose either 7 days, 30 days, or 120 days as your period of evaluation, and limit it to just hashtags that are new to the top 100 list. Each tag gives you the rank, the hashtag and category, the number of posts using it, a trending line graph, whether or not a particular creator is spurring on the trend, and a button to see more detailed analytics.

The more detailed analytics look like this; posts in your period versus overall, interest over time, related videos, audience insights, related interest keywords, popularity by region, and some recommended hashtags.

Personally, I don't find the Songs or Videos tabs to be very useful for non-TikTok marketing. Songs isn't helpful for much. The videos feed might be useful if you want to make response videos or use them as a jumping-off point for content ideas, but that's not super useful in my experience.

Trending creators can be useful if you want to do some influencer marketing, but since it's not keyword information, I'm not really going to cover it in detail here.

What Are the Limitations on TikTok Keyword Data?

While TikTok can get you a lot of useful keyword data, there are a few potential limitations that it's worth thinking about before going all-in on using it.

First of all, part of why TikTok is so big is that a lot of younger people are using it instead of Google as a search engine or source of information. While that means you can capture their interests in a way that Google keyword data can't, it's also inherently limited.

Why? Well, if you produce content and it's not a TikTok video, you're back to relying on Google to spread that content, and the data comes from people who aren't using Google. See the paradox?

This doesn't mean the data is bad or useless, of course. And the truth is, while a lot of these people are choosing TikTok over Google, that doesn't mean they don't use Google; it means they don't prefer Google. Just don't expect to capture the full extent of the audience that TikTok represents, and you'll be in the right ballpark with your expectations.

Another limit is industry. TikTok is huge and has people who cover nearly everything, but there are still a lot of topics that are relatively niche, and a lot of the more traditional business kinds of topics often fall into that category. TikTok is big for things like DIY, recipes, fashion, TV shows, and product recommendations. It's less useful for anything B2B.

At the end of the day, you'll also probably find that a lot of TikTok data is reflective of data you get from other sources.

That's because all of marketing is an ecosystem, and while TikTok does have its own somewhat insular user base, the influencers who take marketing seriously on it are also using other platforms, feeding data back and forth, and creating cyclical loops. You'll find some good opportunities, you'll get a lot of data that isn't immediately useful, and you'll find a lot of duplicate information. Make of that what you will.

Is TikTok keyword data worth using? I say, go for it. It doesn't take that much effort to do some keyword research on TikTok, after all, and any source of data is potentially useful. Whether or not you get value out of it depends on what you manage to do with what you find, though, and that's up to your content marketing prowess as much as it is the data you harvest in the first place.

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