Escape the SEO silo and explore other platforms

Tory says: “Get out of the SEO silo and spend more time on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest.

Understand how users are behaving there and use that data to inform your search strategy in terms of your content. What are users really loving and engaging with? Speak to that in your content and in your campaigns.

What things do users care most about? What are their opinions? How many of them care about it? What are the hashtags they are using?

You can come up with the social metric equivalent of all the metrics that we have for search. How much is it trending? I heard a great stat that, if something is trending on TikTok, it’s going to be trending on Google in two weeks.

Suddenly, for a zero search volume term, you can figure out what’s coming, get ahead of the trends, and understand what people are seeking. That enables you to create that content quickly and be prepared to rank for it once people do start searching for it.”

How do you know which TikTok trends to pay attention to?

“It depends on your industry, but there are native tools within the advertising platform on TikTok, such as the TikTok Trends Report.

Looking at your industry, you can see what people engaging are with. What are the Sounds? What are the topics they’re saying? Are they frustrated? Are they excited? It’s just like an SEO keyword.

The data is telling you what people are talking about. Then you can ask yourself, do you want to talk about this? Is this relevant to our industry? You’re going to have to marry it to your own business strategy and your industry to make sure it’s in alignment. Once you have those two things, you have an interesting platform to move forward on.”

Are you advocating for brands to be active on platforms like TikTok or to primarily use them as a data source?

“All of the above. As a search firm, we’re primarily using it for data to inform SEO, but it can inform your broader marketing and brand strategy as a whole. You can understand, for your industry, what users are frustrated with. That can help you have data for the tooling you are going to build to solve those problems.

There’s a reason that Google’s obsessed with Reddit these days. In mid-August of 2024, we suddenly saw a 200% increased visibility for Reddit. People are very into UGC, perhaps as a way to counter AI content, and they are seeking real authenticity. That means people are there so should you, as a brand, be there? It’s something you should strongly consider.

At a minimum, you should be monitoring what’s happening and using that insight, because that’s where people are talking about the things that they care about.”

Should you change the style of your content to match current trends?

“On TikTok, there are Sounds, which can be little quips or other audio clips. The ‘demure’ trend was very popular in 2024, for example. It was a way to add a funny fresh twist to an existing piece of content. You can frame your social posts around that kind of trend, for example.

If you have an existing post, you might not change that individual piece, but you can frame how you share that piece to make it relevant, hot, and timely by using that updated Sound.

If users are frustrated with a particular problem and your direct-to-consumer product solves that, you can emphasise that, because you know it’s a trending topic. Your users are talking about an issue, and you turn up to solve it. Suddenly, it’s a blog post that explains and connects the dots as to why your product resolves this thing they’re frustrated with.”

Does content also surface on YouTube before it’s discovered on Google?

“It’s not as trending or viral as TikTok. YouTube’s still a great source of information but it tends to be a different audience. Demographically speaking, it is older, and it is a bit more educational and research-based.

You’re not always looking at a platform to find trends. Where you need to look will often depend on your client’s demographic profile. Who is their persona? You want to be looking in a place where you will find the right people and what’s meaningful to them.”

What kind of data are you looking for from Reddit?

“All kinds of things. You can do a sentiment analysis of whether or not people are talking about a subject. Are they frustrated about it? Are they happy about it? How frustrated are they about this particular topic? Are they digging in?

You also get information about how they speak. Just as SEO keywords tell us the terms that our consumers are using, you can see that happening in real time on Reddit. If you analyse how that has changed in the last 6 months, relative to what people were talking about before, then you can understand the new topics to use for your content creation or add information gain to existing content.

If you want to update an old post and you don’t know what new and updated information to consider adding to it, look at what people are talking about on Reddit now that they weren’t talking about before.”

Can you also use these platforms for audience analysis?

“First, we look at where people are talking about that topic. Then we can do some digging to say what kind of people are talking about it, and whether it’s our target audience or not.

For one client, we were looking at whether they should brand their agency around a specific storytelling framework that they had. We found that most of the people talking about that framework were people in the industry. They were other professionals exploring whether or not they wanted to be certified in this specific way of storytelling.

Eventually, they opted to not brand themselves as that kind of agency because it wasn’t going to pull in customers, it would pull in competitors or other people in their industry.

It’s not like Facebook or LinkedIn, where you might state your role or your job. People don’t always put that information out there to the same degree. However, you can often tell based on how they’re talking about it. If you do that sentiment analysis, look for those keywords, and disambiguate who is who, you can get some really interesting insights.”

Is keyword research less important here because you aren’t going to get much search volume?

“You can always look at the rate of growth. It certainly depends on the industry. SEO has been talked about on Reddit forever, so there are subreddits discussing it, but there are new topics within SEO. People are still talking about link building on Reddit, so there’s plenty of volume.

There are plenty of hashtags on YouTube where people are still talking about link building. You can look at whether more people are adding videos about it, or fewer people are. Then, you can look at the related hashtags on those videos and see how it’s evolving. You might see growth in a specific tactic around link building, for example.”

What type of content are you trying to create as a result of this research?

“Honestly, the sky is the limit. What you can and should create is down to your imagination.

SEO content can and should be more than blogs. It should include other content types as well. You can absolutely use this research to inform other types of content creation as well.”

How do you know when to focus on something that you’ve uncovered on one of these platforms over something that appears more tangible in organic search possibilities?

“It depends on the stage of the business you’re in and the maturity of your SEO program. Have you already covered the basic topics? Have you done the analysis to determine whether your pages are doing as well as they used to or need updating? That’s where all of that information can come in handy.

What are the new trends that people are discussing? Are new concepts emerging that you can get ideas from? It can be really tangible. If you’re in an earlier stage and you’re trying to do everything, you can decide whether you want to go after the 1,000 search volume term instead.

Competition would also come into play, and how quickly they can move against this sort of content. With trending content, there are going to be a lot of trends and they are going to change over time. Do you have the skills and capabilities in-house to do that quickly and effectively enough for it to be meaningful? If so, you can prioritise that.”

Are users more fickle nowadays?

“Search behaviour is evolving really quickly. As SEOs, we can get up in arms about it. I remember the Twitter and LinkedIn fight about TikTok not being a search engine. That is correct, by definition, but that doesn’t change the fact that users are treating it as a search engine. They are engaging in search behaviour on TikTok because they can search for things.

They are engaging in traditional social consumption behaviour on their For You Page, but they’re also actively seeking out information. They’re seeking out things to do on vacations and ideas about the hobbies that they like.

On YouTube, it’s the same deal. People will search. It’s not a search engine because you’re only searching within YouTube and not the web as a whole, but that doesn’t matter. Search behaviour is changing, especially for the youth. They get their information from a lot of different places. Go where the users are and learn from them – wherever that may be.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“There are certain shiny objects in the industry right now. Google is doing a lot of algorithm updates, and it’s important to monitor those, but stressing about each and every one instead of looking at the long-term big picture is not the best use of your time – especially if you’re a brand that doesn’t necessarily ebb and flow with those algorithm updates.

There are brands that do and should focus on that, but if you’re not flip-flopping all the time, then stop agonising about it. You should monitor your data and, if you see a drop, you do need to dig in to understand what happened. However, the vast majority of people aren’t experiencing that big flip-flop, and yet we all stress and sit around constantly refreshing Google Search Console. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s 48 hours delayed, so you’re not going to know whether it matters to you for quite some time.

Also, everyone wants to talk about how to show up in AI search engines. Meanwhile, those search engines don’t get a lot of traction. They don’t have enough users to be meaningful yet. I want to be where the users are.

When AI search engines have enough users that they’re driving meaningful traffic to my site, I want to pay attention to those. In the meantime, users are already engaging in search behaviour on YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok. I’m going to go to where the users are and get the data from there.

AI search engines will eventually have to drive meaningful traffic if they want to start competing with Google in a meaningful way. Currently, though, there aren’t any clear winners and none of them are moving meaningful traffic. AI has some growing to do to make it useful for users. There are only so many use cases where the answers actually fit your needs.”

Tory Gray is Founder and CEO at The Gray Dot Company, and you can find her over at TheGray.company.