The Experiment: Do Traditional SEO Tactics Work on Social Media?
Can we leverage what we know about Google content optimization to achieve success in social media SEO? To the lab!
Colin Christensen, Liz Stanton, Paige Cooper
August 22, 2023
Hypothesis: Traditional SEO Tactics Can Help Posts Reach a Wider Audience on Social Media
Social media SEO, or optimizing your social posts to rank higher in search results on platforms, is a completely new game.
In this experiment, we tried some common tips for social media SEO to see if they work on TikTok and Instagram.
Methodology
Here we outline the steps we took in this experiment:
Results
The summary of the results is that social media SEO can improve both reach and engagement rates. Let’s dive deeper.
TikTok Results:
On TikTok, the five optimized videos achieved 33% more views from new people to our account (i.e., from the For You page). They also had a slightly higher average engagement rate: from 4.59% to 4.75%.
The social media SEO-optimized videos achieved 39% more unique views compared to regular videos.
However, when we examined the search results on TikTok for our keywords, we didn’t see our videos appearing in TikTok search results.
Instagram Results:
Due to a tragic mistake, the best-performing videos on Instagram were accidentally boosted. Unfortunately, we were no longer able to access organic results. However, can we consider that an achievement if we conclude that those posts were boosted due to their good performance?
Despite that, the experiment wasn’t a failure. Strangely, we noticed that the social media SEO-optimized videos still achieved higher engagement and interaction rates.
After removing the paid views from the calculated averages, we noticed that fewer people who don’t follow us saw our SEO-optimized content.
But we saw a 25% increase in overall engagement rates and a higher average engagement rate (4.0% versus 3.1%).
What Do the Results Mean?
What do these results mean for your social media strategy?
The biggest takeaway from TikTok is: optimizing keywords can improve views by 40%, including 33% more views from the For You page.
While it may not help rank your video on Google or TikTok search results, that doesn’t mean it’s not helping. You don’t need to see it to believe it.
The biggest takeaway from Instagram is: by optimizing keywords, you might find yourself achieving a 33% increase in engagement rates.
Tips, Tricks, and Insights for Social Media SEO
Now that you know how effective SEO can be for TikTok and Instagram, here are nine tips to get started:
1. Conduct keyword research
2. Use keywords in the title, description, and visual text
3. Include SEO-optimized content on your website or blog
4. Pay attention to the written text in the video
5. Place keywords in the title and description
6. Add text within the video
7. Use alt text
8. Don’t forget the video title and tags
9. Use social media management tools like Hootsuite
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