TikTok SEO is the set of actions that make a video findable by someone typing a query: in the app's search bar and on Google's results page. These are two different searches, with two different algorithms and two different kinds of result. Most guides treat them together, and few try to measure how much the second one actually weighs.
We queried the DataForSEO database for Google UK on 26 September 2026. The tiktok.com domain ranks for 4,470,206 keywords and collects around 23.9 million organic visits a month. Instagram, in the same market on the same day, collects 292 million.
Two different searches we call by the same name
In the first case the user has already opened TikTok and types "courgette recipes" or "how to write a resignation letter". TikTok's recommendation system answers, drawing on videos uploaded to the platform.
In the second case the user is on Google and a TikTok video appears among the organic results, competing with ordinary web pages. Here Google decides, not TikTok. They are two separate markets and have to be measured separately, because a video can do very well inside the app and never appear on Google, or the other way round.
The distinction has an immediate practical consequence: keyword research for the first channel is done in TikTok's search bar, for the second with the same tools you would use for standard keyword research. The two lists of queries have little in common.
How much TikTok weighs in the UK SERP
This is the figure most articles on the subject leave out, so we pulled it ourselves. The table compares the three social platforms most present in Google UK's organic results.
| Domain | Keywords ranked on Google UK | Estimated organic traffic / month |
|---|---|---|
| youtube.com | 14,325,668 | 219,893,694 |
| instagram.com | 9,491,538 | 291,686,159 |
| tiktok.com | 4,470,206 | 23,941,611 |
Instagram gets about 12 times TikTok's traffic from Google UK, YouTube about 9 times. TikTok ranks for four and a half million keywords, but most of them sit outside the positions that generate clicks: 64% of its UK footprint lives between position 11 and position 50, and only 21% reaches the top ten.
If you are deciding how much to invest, this is the number to keep in mind. The in-app channel can make sense; the idea that posting on TikTok brings you traffic from Google holds up much less well than you would think from what gets written about it.
The two routes TikTok takes onto page one of Google UK
Filtering the keywords where tiktok.com appears in the top ten positions, two very clear patterns emerge.
The profile page on brand queries. Someone searching for the name of a company or a person finds the TikTok account among the results. It happens for "the sun" (4,090,000 monthly searches, ninth position), "daily express" (1,830,000, seventh), "racing post" (1,220,000, ninth), "tfl" (823,000, eighth), "katie price" (673,000, ninth). TikTok's own topic pages (/discover/) also rank, for example on "fb marketplace".
The individual video page on informational queries. Here a specific video ranks, not the account. This is the more interesting case because it is the one you can replicate.
| UK query | Monthly volume | Position | Ranking account |
|---|---|---|---|
| yowh | 673,000 | 1 | @israh.vee |
| met office weather today | 550,000 | 6 | @bbcnews |
| results for world cup | 368,000 | 6 | @fifaworldcup |
| centimeters to inches | 368,000 | 7 | @newmathworld |
| autotrader uk | 823,000 | 9 | @autotraderuk |
| man u football transfer news | 550,000 | 10 | @fabrizioromano |
| chinese near me | 550,000 | 10 | @caoimhe.mcx |
Look at the kind of queries they are: slang, weather, unit conversions, football, news. They are searches where a twenty-second video answers better than a page of text, or where the user wants to see something. In total, the UK keywords where a TikTok video page reaches the top ten number 954,756 in the database.
There is almost nothing commercial in that list, and that should give pause to anyone selling services or machinery. The exception is revealing: "chinese near me" is a local query, and the video that ranks is a food review. On queries with transactional intent outside food and local services, Google keeps showing website pages.
The 40% everyone quotes is a 2022 remark about where to have lunch
Many TikTok SEO guides open with the statistic that 40% of young people prefer TikTok and Instagram to Google. It is worth going back to the source.
The remark was made by Prabhakar Raghavan, then Senior Vice President at Google, on 12 July 2022 at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, and reported by TechCrunch. It went like this: "In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they're looking for a place for lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or Search".
So: almost 40%, not 40%. People aged 18 to 24, not young people in general. US users. TikTok and Instagram together, with no idea how they split. And above all: when they are looking for somewhere to have lunch. Rebecca Sentance at Econsultancy traced how that "almost 40% on where to eat" turned into "almost half of young people no longer use Google". Google's internal study was never published.
There is a more recent and more solid figure, and it is still American: Adobe's January 2026 survey of 807 consumers and 200 small business owners in the US says that 49% use TikTok as a search engine, up from 41% in 2024. In the same sample, the most searched content is video tutorials (61%) and product reviews (45%).
For the UK, the public data covers the audience, not search behaviour. According to Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report, published on 10 December 2025 on Ipsos iris audience data, TikTok reached 56% of UK online adults in May 2025, with users aged 18 to 34 spending 49 minutes a day on it.
An absence is also worth pointing out. In SparkToro and Datos's Search Happens Everywhere study, which analysed the 2025 desktop panel for the United States, the EU and the UK and attributes 73.7% of desktop searches across the 41 domains examined to Google, TikTok is not among the domains analysed. The reason is that search on TikTok happens almost entirely in the app, where desktop panels don't reach. Anyone showing you precise numbers on the share of UK searches that go through TikTok is most likely estimating them.
What TikTok says about how ranking works
On the For You feed, TikTok's official documentation lists three families of signals: user interactions (likes, shares, accounts followed, comments), video information (captions, sounds, hashtags) and device and account settings (language, country, device type).
Two clarifications in the same document matter more than the list. The first: "neither follower count nor whether the account has had previous high-performing videos are direct factors in the recommendation system". Follower count is not a direct factor. The second: a strong signal, such as watching a long video to the end, weighs more than a weak one, such as the creator and viewer being in the same country.
On in-app search numbers, the only official figure is in the TikTok for Business blog post introducing the Search Ads Campaign: 57% of users use the search function and 23% search for something within thirty seconds of opening the app. In a footnote, the source is given as TikTok internal data on US users, June 2024.
How to find keywords inside TikTok
No external tool reads TikTok's index. There are three usable sources, all inside the platform's ecosystem.
- Search bar suggestions. Type the term and stop: the completions are real queries ordered by frequency, the equivalent of Google Suggest.
- Related searches below the results. They also appear under individual videos with the label "Others searched for".
- TikTok's Creative Center. The free tool for advertisers that shows the best-performing keywords, hashtags and videos by country, the UK included.
There is a fourth source that hardly anyone mentions and that is worth more than the other three: the Search Ads Campaign. From the ads dashboard you can see the real queries your ads are shown on, with their volumes. The campaign type is available in the UK, as confirmed by TikTok for Business's availability page, updated in April 2026. Thirty pounds spent on a search campaign gives you a list of queries that no third-party tool will.
Where to put keywords in a video
Starting from the three signals TikTok declares, there are four places where the keyword is read: the spoken audio, which is transcribed automatically; the on-screen text; the caption; the hashtags. The fifth is the sound name, which matters for content that follows a trend.
On the number of hashtags, the "3-5 per video" recommendation is everywhere. That number does not exist in TikTok's documentation: hashtags are listed as one of the video signals along with caption and sound, with no quantity given. Treat it as an industry convention, not a platform rule.
The practical difference from video SEO on YouTube is that on TikTok the words spoken in the first seconds count as much as the title. If the video opens with "today I want to talk to you about something", the first three seconds are empty for the algorithm too, not only for the viewer. The same logic that governs ranking on YouTube applies here to the audio instead of the metadata.
How to measure whether it is working
Total views say nothing about search. In a business account's analytics, each video shows its breakdown of traffic sources, and "Search" is a separate line from the For You feed and followers. That is the metric to watch, and in absolute terms: a video with 3,000 views of which 900 came from search is an asset that keeps working; one with 90,000 views all from For You is spent in two days.
The second check is actual position: search your query in incognito, from a new account, and count how many videos come before yours. The third, if you also care about Google, is to check whether the video is indexed, by searching for the exact URL in quotes. Don't expect much here, for the reasons above.
It is worth building a small dashboard with these three items next to the other SEO indicators you already track, instead of reading TikTok analytics as a channel of its own.
Who it makes sense for, and who it doesn't
Our position, after looking at the data above: TikTok SEO is a sensible channel when the product can be shown and the purchase decision is quick. Restaurants and takeaways, beauty, clothing, training, travel, personal services. These are also the sectors where in-app search most resembles a local search, and the "chinese near me" example above shows it happening on Google too.
Outside those sectors the ratio of effort to return changes a lot. Producing video takes time and skills different from those of people who write content, and in industrial B2B the buyer doesn't search on TikTok: they search on Google, with technical queries and low volumes. On a project like Macropix, a Milan-based maker of LED screens, work on classic SEO took the site from position 88 to position 2 and today holds more than a hundred keywords in the top three on Google Italy, with around seven thousand enquiries collected over seven years. The same hours spent on TikTok would not have produced a single quote request.
The criterion is this: if your queries have commercial intent and low volumes, TikTok is the wrong channel. If you have an audience looking for inspiration and visual comparison, the investment holds up. When in doubt, an SEO strategy set up on the right channels costs less than a year of content published in the wrong place, and the projects we have worked on almost always start from this choice.
One last observation that ties into a broader trend: search is moving to platforms that don't send a click back to your site. It applies to zero-click searches on Google, to alternative search engines and to TikTok, where the answer is consumed inside the app. The way different generations search online explains much of this fragmentation, and it is the same issue you face when talking about social media and SEO.
TikTok SEO FAQs
Unlike the For You feed, which decides within the first few hours, in-app search keeps serving a video even months after publication. TikTok does not state indexing times. In practice, search traffic shows up in each video's analytics and grows slowly, so assess it after weeks, not after two days.
Yes, but much less than people claim. According to DataForSEO data for Google UK from 26 September 2026, tiktok.com gets around 23.9 million estimated organic visits a month, against 292 million for Instagram and 220 million for YouTube. There are 954,756 UK keywords where a TikTok video page reaches the top ten, concentrated on slang, weather, news, sport and unit conversions.
No, not directly. TikTok's official documentation on its recommendation system states that neither follower count nor the performance of previous videos are direct factors. An account with many followers still tends to get more views simply because it has a bigger base, but that is an indirect effect.
The 3-5 hashtag recommendation appears in almost every guide but not in TikTok's documentation, which lists hashtags as one of the video signals along with caption and sound without giving a number. Choose them for how well they describe the content, not to hit a fixed count.
TikTok's Creative Center is free and shows the best-performing keywords, hashtags and videos by country, the UK included. The most precise source is still the Search Ads Campaign, available in the UK, which shows in the ads dashboard the real queries your ads appear on. The app's search bar suggestions work like Google Suggest and cost nothing.
According to Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report, published on 10 December 2025 on Ipsos iris audience data, TikTok reached 56% of UK online adults in May 2025, and users aged 18 to 34 spent 49 minutes a day on it. There is no public UK survey on how many of these users use TikTok to search for information.
Something the industry rarely says: the value of a video well optimised for in-app search doesn't show in its views, it shows in the cost per lead compared with the same query bought on Google Ads. On some local keywords the gap is an order of magnitude, and the guides that rank for this keyword rarely put it on the table, because it requires having both channels running for the same client and comparing the numbers. That is where you find out whether TikTok is an acquisition channel or a company hobby.
