TikTok SEO: What Every Business Needs to Know
Google's own executives said younger users are searching on TikTok instead of Google, and by 2023 businesses had to decide whether that applies to them.
In July 2022, Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan told an audience at a Fortune conference that internal data showed nearly 40 percent of young people, when looking for a place to eat lunch, went to TikTok or Instagram first rather than Google Search or Maps. Coming from a Google executive, that admission got attention, and it’s the reason “TikTok SEO” went from a fringe idea to a phrase marketers were searching for by 2023.
What TikTok SEO is
It isn’t traditional SEO transplanted onto a video app. TikTok’s own search function surfaces videos based on spoken words, on-screen text, captions, hashtags and how well a video matches what a user typed, not backlinks or domain authority. Optimizing for it means writing captions and on-screen text the way you’d write for a search engine, using the actual words people search for rather than clever or vague phrasing and treating the first few seconds of a video as the equivalent of a headline that has to earn the rest of the watch.
Should your business care
This is where a decision framework matters more than enthusiasm. TikTok search behavior skews heavily toward specific categories: food and restaurants, beauty and skincare, fashion, travel and local recommendations, the kinds of decisions people naturally want to see demonstrated rather than described in a list of links. If your business fits one of those categories and your customers are on the younger side, this is worth testing.
If you run a B2B software company, a professional services firm or anything where the buying decision is research-heavy and happens over weeks rather than minutes, the case is much weaker. Your customers may well be on TikTok personally, but they’re not necessarily using it to research your category of purchase, and forcing content onto a platform where your audience doesn’t search that way rarely pays off.
What it costs to test
Unlike a lot of paid channels, testing this doesn’t require a large budget. It requires a handful of videos built around actual questions your customers ask, using clear spoken and on-screen text that states the topic plainly, published consistently enough over a few weeks to see whether they gain any traction in TikTok’s search results. If nothing moves after a genuine test, that’s useful information too, and it costs far less to learn than a failed paid campaign would.
The limits worth being honest about
TikTok’s search results are still less mature and less comprehensive than Google’s for most queries, and the platform’s own leadership has talked about search as a growth area rather than a finished feature. Treat it as a channel worth testing where it fits your category, not as a replacement for traditional SEO, which still handles the vast majority of research-driven purchase decisions across most industries.
The practical takeaway
TikTok SEO earned its place in the marketing conversation in 2023 because a genuine behavior shift among younger users is real and documented, not because it’s a trend every business needs to chase. Decide based on whether your customers already turn to video to make the kind of decision you’re selling, not based on how often the phrase shows up in your feed.
More strategy coverage: browse Marketing Strategy guides or everything published in 2023.
