Study: Which Link Metric Correlates Closest to Organic Visibility?

Throughout my career, most of my teams’ digital PR strategies for clients have consisted of closing link gaps, creating new ones, and earning as many high-tier links as possible. The goal was always the same: get our clients' websites to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) and outranking their competitors.

To that end, we’ve earned press coverage for clients on every top-tier publisher you can think of, including "dream publishers'' like CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Business Insider. We’ve even had dozens of campaigns go viral, earning thousands of links and hundreds of thousands of social shares, all resulting from sending a single outreach email to a journalist.

"What's wrong with that?" you might be asking. "It sounds like a successful strategy."

While "going viral" might not carry the same weight it once did, I'll be the first to admit it – there is hardly a more exciting feeling when working in digital PR. And we all know that link volume combined with high authority links will help you rise in the ranks of the SERPs. So, actually, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that strategy.

But when all you care about is lots of links and going viral, sometimes you miss the mark on something that matters just as much, if not more: relevance.

Since 2019, Google has acknowledged that it uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) when assessing the relevancy and intent of users' search queries. So why is no one measuring relevance when it comes to link profiles?

The team at Journey Further sought to do just that — and in our latest study, we demonstrate why link relevance is more important than ever, and how a relevance-led approach can outperform larger and more authoritative websites time and time again.

What does it mean to be relevant in digital PR?

Like most things that catch fire in our industry, "relevance" has become a bit of a buzzword in digital PR. But what does it mean, really?

When you think about relevance, it's simple. Ask yourself:

• Does this campaign relate to the client's product or service?

• Does it have target keywords in it?

• Does it talk about the main topics we want to target?

• Does it answer the search intent?

• Does it make sense for the client to be considered an authority and/or a trusted source on this topic?

If you answered no to most of these, you might want to go back to the drawing board.

For some clients, it can be difficult to come up with an idea that's both relevant and newsworthy. The most relevant idea in the world will not earn links if it's boring, and that's the challenge we all face every day when creating digital PR campaigns for our clients.

Though it's difficult, it's in your clients' best interest for you to think outside the box in ideation and come up with both relevant and link-worthy digital PR ideas — you'll understand why after seeing the data from our latest study.

How do you measure content relevance?

Beyond manually determining relevance with those questions above, what if there was a data-driven way?

Steve Walker, the technology director at Journey Further, found this kind of analysis to be resource-intensive and prone to error. Humans aren't as good at these tasks as machines are, so he created Salient, a free-to-use tool that measures the relevance of your content.

Steve thought, "If Google uses machine learning to measure the relevance of content, why aren't we?"

Using this proprietary technology powered by Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology is how we can measure the relevance of content, analyzing an entire website's link profile rather than individual articles. Incorporating the IBM Watson Machine Learning API allows us to extract sentiment, recurring keywords and entities, and a relevancy and frequency score for each topic.

Off the back of this insight, we can understand what gaps exist in the relevancy of the link profile. This information then guides our PR and content strategies to drive organic visibility.

Study: Which link metric correlates closest to organic visibility?

So, how important is relevance compared with much-heralded metrics like Domain Authority (DA) and link volume?

In a data-driven attempt to learn which metric is statistically the best driver of organic visibility, our team at Journey Further analyzed the organic rankings of 6,000 commercially valuable keywords, calculating share of voice for a range of competing websites. From there, we measured the correlation of these scores against three link metrics:

1. Number of unique linking domains

2. Domain Authority

3. Topical link profile relevance

In this study, we focused on the home retail sector, with the following focus areas:

Across all 15 sectors, topical link relevance was the only metric that had a positive correlation to organic visibility

The findings of our study show that topical link relevance has the strongest correlation in 10 out of 15 sectors.

Domain Authority had a stronger correlation in five sectors: outdoor/patio, office furniture, bedding, desks, and pillows.

Unique linking domains never had the strongest correlation to organic visibility and, in fact, showed a negative correlation in 6 out of 15 sectors.

However, across all 15 sectors, topical link relevance was the only metric that positively correlated to organic visibility every time.

That's the TL;DR of it, but read on for a deeper look at some individual topic areas and how we came to these figures. View the full study here.

Definitions and Limitations

To better understand the data, let's detail some definitions first:

Correlation coefficient: A linear measure of the correlation between two variables. A value of 0 indicates no association between the two variables. A value greater than 0 indicates a positive association, and a value less than 0 indicates a negative association.

Organic share of voice (SOV): Organic SOV is a metric that represents how much organic traffic a site receives vs. the other sites in that sector for a set of high-traffic keywords. It considers keyword volumes, click-through rates, ranking position, and SERP features. The final SOV is expressed as a percentage of that keyword set's total available search volume. So if your SOV is 25%, you're winning 25% of the clicks for that set.

Topical link relevance: A score that shows the relevance of a keyword or topic to the entire document text or range of pages analyzed - in this case, the text on each page that links back to the sites we analyzed. The higher the number, the more relevant a topic. A score of 0 means that the topic was not relevant at all.

Unique linking domains: The total number of unique domains that link back to each site.

Domain Authority (DA): A ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website will rank on SERPs. A DA score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater visibility.

Limitations

This study relies on correlation and thus has limitations. Please note that correlation ≠ causation, and because Google historically does not comment on studies, or reveal precisely how the ranking algorithm works, we’ll likely never find causation. However, based on patents mentioning the use of topical relevance in combination with the findings of the correlation studies, we can be confident in the validity of the data.

Relevance vs. Link Volume

As an example, let's look at the bathroom sector. When looking at hundreds of keywords related to bathrooms like bathroom mirrors and bathroom ideas, we found that this sector has over 1.8 million searches per month, with leading home brands competing for share of voice.

After analyzing the backlink profile and relevance score, we then calculate a correlation with that brand's share of voice to determine if there is any connection between this metric and organic visibility.

• Anything below zero has a negative correlation, so there is no connection.

• Anything over zero has a positive correlation.

• The higher the correlation, the stronger the relationship between the metrics and organic visibility.

With a correlation coefficient of .74, it's clear that the metric that is most closely related to organic visibility for the bathroom sector is topical link relevance.

Unique linking domains, in this case, has a negative correlation. For example, IKEA has a backlink profile of more than 406K ULDs, but doesn’t have the biggest market share, which shows that there is no correlation to the link volume and market share.

Relevance vs. Domain Authority

When looking at hundreds of keywords related to dressers, we found that this sector has over 1.6 million searches per month.

Again, we did the same thing here and compared each brand's backlink profile and relevance score to that brand's share of voice.

With a correlation coefficient of .61, we see that topical link relevance is the metric most closely related to organic visibility for the dressers sector.

However, this example demonstrates that all three metrics (relevance, Domain Authority, and link volume) are critical to organic visibility. All three have a very high correlation, which suggests that not only are these metrics correlated, but perhaps they are integral for boosting organic visibility in this sector.

View the full study here. (And feel free to reach out to me directly if you want us to run a free relevance report for you).

In SEO, it's not enough to be popular, you also need to be relevant

Historically, the SEO industry has relied on metrics like Domain Authority and link volume. These two metrics are important, but only provide a portion of the puzzle. Alone, they don't answer Google's primary question: which website is the most relevant for a query?

We've all seen campaigns out in the wild that make us scratch our heads, thinking, "what does this topic have to do with that client?" Think: why is a CBD company pushing out a study on anything but CBD? Why is a company that sells bathroom fixtures creating content about dogs?

When you fail to see the connection between the story and the client, you know they're only thinking of one thing: links.

But, as my colleague Beth Nunnington likes to say, "in SEO, it's not enough to be popular, you also need to be relevant."

Don’t forget, most clients don't want links for links' sake. They want what links bring: increased traffic, better rankings for priority keywords, increased revenue, brand awareness, etc.

And links will only serve those goals when they're relevant.

Don't get me wrong – I still LOVE a CNN placement (and so do clients), but now, I'd also like it to be relevant.

How to E-A-T Ethically with Digital PR

It’s an old marketing cliche that people buy from people, not brands, and if you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll be inundated with personal branding gurus explaining to you exactly why that is.

Ultimately, it all comes down to trust — the T in Google’s E-A-T.

People are more likely to trust a brand or organization with a real human face. In a crowded e-commerce space, that trust (or lack thereof) can make or break a website’s fortune in the SERPs.

This, combined with a move away from historic link-building activities, such as link exchanges or broken link building, has seen brands of all sizes from household names to e-commerce start-ups jump on the thought-leadership bandwagon.

Free and easy-to-access tools such as HARO and the Twitter #journorequest hashtag offer a low barrier to entry and give the misleading impression that this is an easy route to links in top-tier publications — without the need to invest in a long-term strategy.

When done right, this type of digital PR can deliver a range of benefits for both SEO and brand awareness, but building trust both with search engines and consumers takes time and consistency.

Below I’ve included some examples of best practice, as well as explained how to avoid common pitfalls.

About who?

A strong “About Us” page is one of the most important on-page trust signals for a content SEO strategy when it comes to E-A-T. Whether you’re using the page to introduce one subject matter expert or a whole team, make sure to include a decent headshot and a bio clearly outlining their credentials, role, and expertise.

The Huel “About Us” page is a great example featuring a photo and quick bio of their founder Julian Hearn:

Don’t invent a subject matter expert just to put a face to the website and suggest that content is written with authority. And don’t be tempted to use a stock photo on an “About Us” page or author profile — we all know how easy it is to reverse image search a profile picture. If a journalist is impressed with an expert's credentials, and reaches out for a phone or Zoom interview with someone who doesn’t exist, it’s going to be very awkward.

Don’t fake it until you make it

Google has made it clear that it values everyday expertise, so there really is no need to fake a doctorate. Instead, find an authentic way to present real, lived expertise.

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines state:

“Some topics require less formal expertise. Many people write extremely detailed, helpful reviews of products or restaurants. Many people share tips and life experiences on forums, blogs, etc.”

Huel is a nutrition brand but its founder is honest about his area of expertise, which is business and start-ups. The Huel website doesn’t attempt to present him as a qualified nutritionist in hopes of landing links or impressing Google.

This level of transparency is best practice whatever the industry, but is especially important for financial or medical experts, which leads us on to...

Health and wealth

Google has been very open about setting a higher bar for what it deems “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) pages. This is any page that, according to the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, could impact thefuture happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.

This doesn't just apply to the websites of banks or healthcare providers. Health and wealth could cover a multitude of e-commerce industries, from websites selling CBD products, vapes, or supplements, to online casinos and loan services.

Google wants to see that this content is written by those with authority on these topics. Digital PR can play a crucial role by positioning on-site authors as subject experts and having them cited elsewhere — whether that be in newspapers, academic studies, or on government websites.

When outreaching content, it’s always best to assume that both Google’s algorithm and a journalist’s instincts are going to be well trained in identifying a real expert from a phony.

Content conflict

Digital PR is still PR — yes we’re here to build links, but those who adopt a “links at all costs” approach will often find it comes at the detriment of a brand.

There’s nothing wrong with using a strong soundbite to get coverage in the press, and there is nothing wrong with being controversial when appropriate. Some start-ups deliberately build a reputation on being outspoken and disruptive, but you must always consider how a quote will reflect on the brand, and crucially, whether it will contradict company ethos.

Reactive PR, especially newsjacking, is fast-paced, and this can make abiding by tone of voice guidelines feel like wasted time. But remember: you’re not just building links, you’re building a reputation. This means you run the risk of doing serious reputational damage if you ignore a brand's vision and values in the quest for links.

In a world of screenshots and digital “receipts”, being caught saying one thing in the press and one thing on site can make a brand or expert look at best a bit silly and at worst untrustworthy.

Huel are open on their About Us page about Julian's expertise, and they take the same approach in the press. Julian is cited as talking about business and start-ups in business publications, not talking about nutrients in science journals.

It’s also worth bearing in mind whether a brand or expert can add real value to a story, especially when the news centers around real human suffering such as a school shooting or the invasion of Ukraine. Sometimes it's better to just sit a story out — there are bigger things than SEO.

Don’t sleep on socials

When it comes to trust signals, social profiles can often be overlooked. After all, it’s not usually something that falls under digital PR’s remit. However, when you’ve got a real subject matter expert on page, you're going to want to ensure that both journalists and Google know this.

If you contact a journalist with commentary or analysis from an on-page subject expert, the likelihood is they will Google them, and a public-facing social profile (LinkedIn, Twitter, or even TikTok) that demonstrates industry or subject knowledge will make the journalist feel more comfortable including them in an article.

Make sure that the About Us page links out to these social profiles, and don’t forget to include a link back to the site in the bio of the social profiles.

The perfect E-A-T circle

When Google sets its Search Quality Raters on a website, they will cross the web looking for signals confirming expertise and authority – including everything from news articles to Wikipedia pages – meaning even non-linked citations have value here.

This is where a holistic thought-leadership for digital PR strategy that incorporates newsjacking, About Us pages, and social profiles can start helping both Google and journalists connect the dots on a thought-leader's expertise.

A subject-relevant news article that cites an expert's name, or better yet, links to an About Us page, means that the next time a journalist Googles them, they’ll see even more evidence that they are an expert.

This should result in more coverage, more evidence of authority on the topic, and ultimately more trust signals for Google. The perfect circle of expertise, authority, and trust.

How to Maximize Your Content — Whiteboard Friday

In today’s episode, content marketing expert Ross Simmonds walks you through the content life cycle, and how you can use it to ensure that the content that you're developing quarter after quarter, month after month, year after year, is actually maximized for ROI, results, and impact.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz friends. It's Ross Simmonds from Foundation Marketing, and in this video I'm going to be talking to you about something that I care deeply about, how to maximize your content.

We've all produced content. You've probably just produced a piece of content within the last few days, the last few weeks, maybe last few months. You've prepared and developed pieces of content that you believe will serve your audience. Congratulations, you've taken a big step. This is a big step for you because you've created something. It's an amazing situation to be in. Not a lot of brands do it. So if you've done it, congratulations.

But what I want to talk about in this video is how you can ensure that the content that you're creating, the content that you're producing, the content that your team is developing quarter after quarter, month after month, year after year is actually maximized for ROI, maximized for result and impact.

The lifecycle of content

So let's talk through the life cycle of content, how you can ensure that the content that you're producing is actually going to drive results, and how you can set your team up for success to leverage that content consistently so you are impacting your audience in a meaningful way.

Pre-launch

So how do you start all of this? You start pre-launch. Before you press Publish on a piece of content, before you launch that landing page, before you roll out a series of new landing pages, before you roll out a handful of comparison pages between your product and the next, landing pages that are going to educate people on keywords related to your industry, before you do any of that, you have to do research. You have to research your audience. You have to understand the intent behind the things that they're typing into Google. You need to understand the problems and the pains that they're trying to solve.

You need to invest time in researching the channels that your audience are spending the most time on. Why? Because what you're going to do is not take the typical approach of pressing Publish on pieces of content, giving yourselves pats on the back, and calling it a day. No, you're going to embrace this model, a model where you are actually going to distribute your content in channels where your audience is spending time, and you're going to maximize the ROI out of your content because of that.

But first, you have to create content with intent. You have to understand the intent of the assets that you're creating. You don't write blog posts for the sake of writing blog posts. Somewhere along the lines, we've gotten into this trap where marketers have kind of thought, oh, all content just needs to be published. If you press Publish on content, the world will be yours.

That's not enough. You need to have, with your content, clear intent. You have to know exactly why you're creating these assets. When you do that and you root it in research, then you're ready to launch. You're ready to launch a piece of content that you believe is going to resonate with your audience. You're going to launch that piece, and you're going to be excited about it, and you should be. This is an amazing moment.

But the next thing you do, after you press Publish on that piece of content, is typically what's going to make or break that asset. It's what's going to determine if your content soars or if your content flops. Typically, what people do is they just share them on channels that they own, and then, yes, it tends to flop.

Understand your distribution channels

What is this? What does this mean? Money channels. Money channels are one of the four different types of channels that you can distribute your content on.

There are four different channels that every brand should be able to understand and map out as it relates to the places in which they distribute their stories, their content, and the way in which that they distribute that content after it goes live. We have money channels, we have rocket channels, we have ghost channels, and we have questionable channels. What are each of these channels?

So when you look at this entire grid, you see audience fit and competition. In channels where you have high audience fit, high competition, we consider those money channels. What does that mean? It means your competition is already there. Your competition has identified that this is a channel where they too can generate revenue. They too can generate ROI. It's also high audience fit. If your audience is there, your audience is spending a lot of time on this channel, this is a money channel. It's a channel that you probably already own.

Maybe you're on LinkedIn because you're in B2B. Maybe you're on Instagram because you're in B2C. You know, with confidence, on these money channels, that every single time you distribute your stories, every single time you distribute your content, you're going to see an impact, you're going to see ROI, and you want to leverage these as much as possible.

Then we have our rocket channels. Rocket channels also have high audience fit. These are channels where your audience is spending a ton of time. These are channels where you want to be because you know that your audience is there. But it has low competition. Shh, don't tell anyone. These are the channels that you don't want your competitors to know about, because your competitors don't realize your audience is spending a lot of time on these channels. To the rest of the world, they might seem very risky. Ooh, you're using Reddit. Ooh, you're leveraging Facebook groups. This is a very risky channel.

What they don't know is that all of your audience is there. So it's a money channel. I mean, it's a rocket channel. A money channel would be if your competitors are there. If your competitors aren't there, then it's a rocket channel. These are my favorite. I love rocket channels because it means that there's not a lot of competition, which means that your content and the stories that you produce might be, for a short period of time, the only stories and assets on this topic and in your niche that your audience is getting exposure to. If they're doing that and they're getting exposed to your brand consistently, you're building a true brand connection with an audience that really wants your content. So that's what you want in a rocket channel.

Then you have low competition and low audience fit channels. What are those? Those are essentially ghost channels. Nobody is there. Your competition isn't there. Your audience isn't there. It makes absolutely no sense for you to leverage these channels. It's okay for these channels to exist. They're going to happen in every single niche. Some people just aren't going to be leveraging a certain channel, and that's okay. You can ignore them. Don't go on them. It's all right. Avoid them at all costs.

But then, there are going to be some questionable channels that are actually going to just completely make you scratch your head. These are channels where your competition levels are very high. Tons of people are using this channel in terms of your competition, but no one is there as it relates to your audience. So it makes you scratch your head. Why are they there? Why is my competitor spending time on this channel?

That provides you with two insights. One, maybe you need to research and understand whether or not there's some real opportunity there that you're overlooking, or two, maybe you need to ask yourself, is this just some legacy efforts that are happening where your competitors are using this because it used to work in the past and they haven't caught onto the fact that it's no longer working. Those are the questions you need to ask.

Optimize your distribution engine

Now, once you have an understanding of that, once you have an understanding of money channels, rocket channels, ghost channels, and questionable channels, the next step is to ask yourself how you can leverage this information to create and optimize your distribution engine so you can really maximize that content.

Money channels

So you start to go to those money channels. You send that content out on the money channels that you own. This is typically where the life cycle of content distribution within most brands ends. We press Publish on a piece of content. We share it on Twitter. We share it on LinkedIn. We might even share it on Facebook. We'll send it out to our newsletter and the people who have subscribed to our list. That's it. We call it a day, and it's over.

That all happens typically within one week. Then we start the process all over again with new content, and we continue back and forth, back and forth, doing this cycle, just like it's Groundhog Day, instead of recognizing that there are plenty of other opportunities that you should be leveraging to maximize your content. Most brands just embrace this, money channels and that's it.

Rocket channels

What you're going to do is different. You're going to start to embrace rocket channels. You're going to start to think about how you can distribute your content in channels and in areas where your audience is spending time that your competition has overlooked. You want to ensure that you're spreading your content in sites, in communities, in forums, in newsletters, in sponsoring newsletters, in leveraging newsletters, leveraging in product opportunities. You want to be thinking strategically around how you can distribute your content in ways that your competitors are overlooking.

Maintain momentum

Then you want to maintain that momentum. We no longer are thinking about this in a short period of time. You're trying to maintain momentum, and you're launching this content over and over and over again. You're keeping the hype going as it relates to your content.

Experiment

Then, you're going to start to experiment. You're going to experiment and try things that other people would say is too risky. You're going to try things that might not even take a lot of energy and a lot of time but could ultimately unlock for you a new opportunity. Maybe you're going to experiment by taking a blog post and turning it into something new. Maybe you're going to connect with an influencer and see if they'll talk about your content. Maybe you're going to send a DM to someone. Maybe you're going to experiment where you're going to run an internal campaign where your entire team is going to amplify a piece of content for 24 hours on social. Everyone is going to be encouraged and trained and taught how to leverage social to distribute that content, and you're going to make a splash. You're going to experiment.

There's no such thing as an idea that is too wild when you are embracing the experimentation status point in this engine and in this time frame. You want to experiment with your content.

Repurpose

Once you've done that, you'll want to start repurposing it. That blog post, that article, that essay that you created shouldn't live and die in just one format. It should be repurposed. Can you turn that blog post into a YouTube video? Can you turn that YouTube video into a podcast? Can you take clips of that YouTube video and then share 30-second clips on social, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, on TikTok, on all of these different channels?

How can you repurpose your content? Can you take that content and potentially turn it into a new infographic, a carousel, a story that is interactive? What can you do to repurpose your content so it doesn't solely exist in one format?

Once you start to do that, you might even turn it into something like a Twitter thread. You might find that one of those pieces of content that you repurposed takes a whole new life where it's generating more engagement, more dialogue, more stories, more narratives that ultimately give you the opportunity to connect with more people.

Reshare

You're also going to share that content. A lot of people, again, make that mistake. They share it once and then they call it a day. You're not going to do that. You have to recognize that the people who happen to be online on Monday at 3:00 p.m. aren't the same people who are online on Thursday at 6:00 a.m. in the morning. That is why resharing your content is important.

Even that same newsletter that you sent out two months ago, two weeks ago, and you plugged an article that you were so excited went live, guess what? Some people were on vacation. Some people didn't open it. Some people happened to be caught up in watching "PAW Patrol" at the time, and they didn't get a chance to see your content. That's an okay situation. You want to leverage that. Leverage that as an insight to understand why you should reshare your content because people are busy. Not everyone saw your piece of content as much as you would like to think on the day in which it went live. So reshare your content, repost it, and reshare it frequently.

Syndicate

Then, you're going to think about syndication opportunities. This is how you can scale your content consistently across a handful of different publications, a handful of different URLs that you know your audience is already subscribed to, that you know your audience is following and reading and consuming, and you want to syndicate your content through these channels.

Now, it can get very meta, because if you repurpose your content into a YouTube video, you can take that YouTube video and embed it directly into the blog post that is ultimately now being syndicated into one of these communities, and then you can reshare that piece. It all starts to work together. That is how you maximize your content.

Optimize and update

Now, at this point, you might be thinking, whoa, this is too much. I'm done. I can't continue. But I beg you to please continue because there's one more major step — optimizing that content. You want to optimize and update that content for two key reasons, one SEO, two, CRO.

You want to optimize this content so it is more likely to show up in search. If you created that content with intent and you had the intent of ranking for some keywords that are informational, or you had the intent of ranking for keywords that are going to be educational to your audience, you want to optimize it. You want to optimize that content based off of new trends and behaviors that you're seeing in the market. You're going to check out the SERP and see what new questions people also ask and update that content to reflect new insights and new information.

You want to make sure that you're optimizing and updating this content with new data, with new graphics, with the new assets that you might have already developed and you start to embed them in there. You might start to take graphics that you leveraged in a piece of content that you repurposed and start to update it with that as well so you can leverage Google images. You're going to put the YouTube video in there. Google and YouTube are in cahoots. Of course, they're all one entity. You want to leverage that to optimize and update your content on a regular basis.

This is maintenance mode. This is when, every 6 to 12 months, you are doing a refresh of your content. Why? Because you recognize the importance of maximizing your content. You recognize the idea that a piece of content shouldn't just live and die within the first week of being published. It's something that should be maximized. It's something that should be optimized, repurposed, syndicated, distributed, and leveraged so you can unlock rocket channels that will ultimately give your content the opportunity to go to the moon.

Thank you so much for checking out this Whiteboard Friday. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Ross Simmonds, and I would be happy to connect with you on social. I'm @TheCoolestCool, and I would love to connect with you there. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Announcing the Keyword Research Certification: Create a Personalized Keyword Strategy

The heart of your SEO. The foundation for building ideas and thoughts in your industry. The vital link between you and your audience.

What are we talking about? Keywords, of course!

Keyword research is a fundamental aspect of any SEO strategy, so it’s important to know why you should do it, and how you should go about it. The power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products. Too many people bypass this crucial planning step because keyword research takes time, and why spend the time when you already know what you want to rank for?

The answer is that what you want to rank for and what your audience actually wants are often two completely different things. Focusing on your audience and using keyword data to your advantage will make for much more successful campaigns than if you were to focus on the typical desirable keywords.

With that, we are so excited to announce the launch of our brand-new Keyword Research Certification from Moz Academy. It joins our four other Certifications in our course catalog: SEO Essentials Certification, Technical SEO Certification, Local SEO Certification and SEO Competitive Analysis Certification.

We are also thrilled to offer 50% off this Certification for the first 100 purchases. Simply use the promo code: keyword50 while the offer is still valid.

Let’s get started!

With this engaging, on-demand instructor-led course, you can learn at your own pace, participate in tasks and take quizzes along the way, as well as complete a final exam, earning you a certificate and LinkedIn badge as proof of your achievement.

Why take this course?

Contrary to popular belief, keyword research is not a one-off task. You should dive into keyword research every time you create new content, or refresh existing content. By regularly assessing the ways in which people search - and by identifying specific and ever-changing ways that people search for content within your niche - you can continue to create content your audience will enjoy and share. Combined with other solid SEO processes, keyword research helps you to produce a repeatable content process that consistently earns traffic over time.

What’s included in the Keyword Research Certification?

The Keyword Research Certification is a five-part series focused on keyword research, strategy and analysis. Complete with over four hours of video lessons, tasks, and activities, you’ll be able to test your understanding and apply important concepts throughout. At the end of the series, you’ll take a final exam and receive your certificate and LinkedIn badge.

The certification is organized into five sections:

1. Explore the Fundamentals of Keyword Research

The first course of the series lays the groundwork for the rest of the certification curriculum, beginning with a discussion of why keyword research matters and what it looks like.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Define keyword research, and describe its importance in reaching your target audience

• List the types of keywords, and describe how they shape your keyword strategy

• Explain past Google algorithm updates

• Dispel SEO myths, and anticipate future trends in keyword research

• Select an SEO keyword ranking tool best suited to your needs and goals

• Track and measure your keyword success

2. Get to Know Your Customer

Now that we’ve established the purpose of keyword research and how it fits into your larger SEO strategy, it’s time to dig in: who are your competitors?

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Actively listen to your audience, and apply these conversations to your keyword planning

• Align your strategy with how Google perceives entities and your industry

• List the types of search intent, and match your content to audience intent

• Format your content for SERP features relevant to your industry

• Evaluate keywords using Moz Pro and other tools

• Discover hot topics in your industry, and analyze the type of content Google finds valuable

3. Create a Keyword Strategy

In this course, you will learn how you fit into the sales funnel and establish a process for conducting keyword research.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Describe the stages of the sales funnel and how they relate to SEO

• Create a keyword model based on the sales funnel and semantic search

• Establish a process for keyword research

• Analyze your website’s current rankings and identify your strengths

• Develop scalable keyword lists and keyword clusters

• Identify target keywords to create new - and improve existing - content

• Create an SEO tracking system, and assess a brand’s Search Visibility across keyword clusters

• Map your keyword strategy to your website’s most valuable pages

4. Track Your Success & Next Steps

In this section of the Certification, you will learn how you can track your keyword success and know how to customize a strategy to suit your needs.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Identify questions your audience is asking

• Employ a variety of tools to discover how people are talking about your brand

• Adjust your SEO strategy according to local, international, and B2B best practices

• Uncover new content ideas, and use keyword tools to acquaint yourself with an unfamiliar topic

• Increase your visibility by discovering featured snippet opportunities for your brand

• Evaluate your competitors’ success, and refine your blueprint based on your findings

• Support your keyword strategy with healthy technical SEO and link building practices

5. Final Exam

Once you’ve completed your training, you will have the opportunity to take an exam to earn your certificate and LinkedIn badge to display your accomplishment to professional peers, employers, and potential clients.

Don’t forget, the first 100 purchases can avail of 50% off this Certification by using the promo code: keyword50 - get yours now!

Keyword Research Certification FAQs

How do I get certified?

The Keyword Research Certification is available now on Moz Academy. Simply access the series from the course catalog, register, and get started! Once you’ve completed the series and passed the final exam, you’ll receive an official certificate and a badge for your LinkedIn profile.

How long will the series take to complete?

The certification series includes approximately four hours of instructor-led curriculum, in addition to activities to test your understanding and the final exam. With all of that in mind, you can expect your time commitment to be about six-seven hours in total.

How long is the Keyword Research Certification valid? Do my credentials expire?

You will have access to the training materials for one year after purchase. Your Keyword Research Certification credentials, however, will not expire.

I don't have a Moz Pro subscription – is the Keyword Research Certification still relevant for me?

Yes! We do use Moz Pro, in addition to various other tools, to apply certain concepts throughout the certification series. That being said, having a Moz Pro subscription is not a requirement, and you’ll learn how to apply the concepts regardless of which tools you use. The concepts and activities throughout the certification are generally tool-agnostic.

Take the course!

The 7-Day Quick Start Guide to SEO + Cheat Sheet

We all start somewhere.

For you, it's your very first day of SEO.

Or, more precisely—for the sake of this guide—your first seven days of SEO.

If you do any kind of web marketing, you know that business and website owners frequently ask for SEO advice. Answering can be difficult because, short of hiring a professional, it's hard to explain to absolute beginners where to start.

For example, what do you tell the small manufacturing business owner who wants to learn the SEO ropes but doesn't have a year or two to master the finer details?

The best answer has always been "read the Beginner's Guide to SEO."

And that's a great answer. For over a decade, the Beginner's Guide has served as a solid and frequently updated resource for those looking to cover the basics, mixing in-depth theory with practical application. I've personally referred people to it literally hundreds of times.

To which the busy business owner replies, "That sounds great, but what do I do about SEO today? We need results ASAP."

To fill this gap and to help more people, we needed a different type of SEO resource.

Improving the time it takes SEO to work

Unless you work for an agency or want to make a lifelong career out of SEO (an excellent choice), most folks don't learn SEO for the sake of learning SEO.

For example, I started in SEO because I built a website that needed marketing. Other people may want to reduce spending on social media advertising. Still others simply have a new product that needs demand.

In other words, people seek SEO because they want results.

And they typically want those results sooner than later.

"How long does it take SEO to work?" is one of the most common questions in our industry. The truth is, of course, it depends. Different activities are impactful over different time periods, from mere days to long months.

Here's a rough estimation of how different SEO activities might impact Google traffic over various timeframes:

• Quickly (days to weeks): Indexability, title tags, search appearance

• Medium (weeks to months): Keyword targeting, content creation

• Slowly (months): Link building, site architecture

Professional SEO agencies, when looking for "quick wins" for clients, often implement a handful of tried and true tactics, things such as a simple health check, title tag optimization, structured data, and internal linking.

Here's the deal: you want the same quick wins that professional SEOs look for, while at the same time setting yourself up for long-term success.

Getting SEO results more quickly

To solve all of these challenges, we created the Quick Start Guide to SEO.

You can find it incorporated into the Intro Chapter of The Beginner's Guide to SEO. Since most people reading the Beginner's Guide are very new to SEO, it made the most sense to put it there.

The Quick Start Guide includes seven days of actions to check the SEO health of your site while putting you on the path of sustained improvement. To make it actionable, the Quick Start Guide is short and sweet, but if you want something even more compact, we also created the SEO Quick Start Guide Cheat Sheet. This serves as a one-page sheet you can use for easy reference.

Get a free downloadable copy by clicking the link below.

Get the SEO Quick Start Cheat Sheet

Quick Start Guide to SEO: An overview

More detail can be found in the Beginner’s Guide, but here's a quick overview:

How to use:

• Each task is a day

• You can start, and in many cases even complete, each task in an hour or two. That said, several tasks take much more than that. An SEO professional might spend 7-20 hours on an audit. (Some audits take 40 hours or longer.) Of course, you're starting from scratch, so some things might take significantly more investment of your time.

• The key is to introduce yourselves to these concepts so that you're set up for future success.

Here's what each day covers:

Day 1. Gather your SEO data

SEO is all about working with the right data, and you want to make sure you're looking at the right stuff. Setting up analytics and registering for free with search engines is a simple first step to gathering the data you'll need for most SEO tasks.

Day 2. See how your site is indexed

This day you'll do a quick "health check" to ensure your site is eligible to appear in search results. Learn a few core tricks of the trade to make sure your site isn't stopping itself from fully appearing in Google search results.

Day 3. Target specific keywords

This is where the "magic" happens. SEO is all about providing useful content for exactly what users are searching for. Making sure there's a match between what users ask and what you deliver is the key to success.

Day 4. Optimize your search appearance

At this point, you will examine how your website "looks" in Google search. Do users want to click your result? Have you taken advantage of the various appearance options Google offers? Dialing in your SEO here may make the difference between simply ranking and actually getting visits to your site.

Day 5. Create content like a boss

SEO relies on content. Whether you are creating new pages to capture more keywords or optimizing existing pages, you want to make sure your on-page optimization is solid. From keyword placement to images, we'll cover the basics here.

Day 6. Internal links & site architecture

Here we want to explore how easily users — and search engines — can navigate your site to find what they’re looking for. Examining your navigation, site structure, and internal links can often lead to significant wins.

Day 7. Gaining popularity via link building

You most likely won't conquer link building in a single day, but you can definitely get started. Promoting your site and getting links from others is a bedrock of good SEO. Link building can be challenging, but we'll show you how to gather your data, help you see where the opportunities are, and hopefully inspire you to a few good ideas.

That's it! Hopefully, you enjoy the new Quick Start Guide. If you haven't already, you can download your one-sheet copy of the Cheat Sheet here.

Get the SEO Quick Start Cheat Sheet

Best of luck with your SEO!

Metrics for Better Keyword Research — Whiteboard Friday

Many SEOs think of keyword research as a very basic part of SEO, which can actually be a problem. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Tom explains some of the common mistakes SEOs make when doing keyword research that are easy to fix, many of which come from metrics like search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today I'm going to be talking to you about metrics, but specifically metrics for keyword research. Now I think this is a very fundamental part of SEO. A lot of people think of it as a very basic part of SEO, which can be a problem sometimes.

I think often this might be the very first task you're asked to do in your SEO career. But I think there are some common sort of mistakes or misunderstandings within keyword research that are quite easy to fix, and a lot of it comes from metrics. So these are the three metrics I want to talk about today. So there's search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty. I want to talk to you about how you can sort of use these together and where you need to be careful. 

Search volume

So search volume, I think obviously you're not going to get away from this as a metric. I'm not asking you to get away from this as a metric, don't worry. But it does have some well-known problems and some lesser-known problems. 

Problems with Google Keyword Planner data

So one of the better known ones is, I think, probably about seven years ago now, I can remember the late great Russ Jones talking about some of the problems with Google Keyword Planner data, which is really a ubiquitous data source in a lot of tools.

I understand why. In a lot of cases, it's the only practical data source to use. But Google Keyword Planner data has some issues. So I'm not going to go into those now because, like I say, it's been talked about a lot in the industry. Hopefully, some of those older resources will be linked to below. 

But I just want to talk about how impactful it can be in your research and in what you're trying to do for your business. So I did a test recently where I gathered a bunch of sample keywords and I benchmarked them in various metrics and various tools to see what volumes I got. Now, the source of truth I'm using here is Google Search Console. So you can be reasonably confident that if you rank first for something, then in Google Search Console, the number of impressions you have will be equivalent to the true volume.

Now, there are some caveats there. Maybe you only rank first on certain days or in certain locals or certain devices. There's a bunch of data cleaning and work that we have to do to clean that out. But once that's done, we can say, okay, in this particular sample of keywords, the average search volume was about 97 searches a month. Now, it could have been anything. 

Just in this particular sample it happened to be 97 searches a month. Now, in Moz's tools, I put in the same set of keywords and we got an average of 101, which I'm pretty pleased with. That's quite close. Then in a couple of competing tools that also don't use Google Keyword Planner data, they got 150 and 190. So same sort of order of magnitude.

But then the Google Keyword Planner data, on average was 1,803. So that doesn't even fit on the whiteboard, by the way, to get that chart into scale. Obviously, that's quite a big problem. If you were using this in anything sort of business critical and your boss is saying, "Oh, can you estimate how much traffic this new site section might get or how much revenue we might make," and your estimate is out by a factor of 18, that is going to be a problem.

So this is a big danger. Even though this is an old problem, I was actually surprised by how impactful this could be in the real world. 

SERPs changing over time

The other problem with keyword volume is a bit of a subtler one, and it has to do with how much SERPs are changing over time now. The issue here is that we're only interested in search volume because we're interested in clicks.

We want people to search a keyword, and we want to know how many people are searching a keyword because we think we might win their click by ranking. But the trouble is, these days, search volume doesn't actually give you that much of an idea about how many people might click or could click. So you might have keywords with very similar volumes that actually have very different numbers of clicks available.

This is a random sample of keywords from 750 keywords from MozCast. I put these into Moz Pro to get an idea of the different click-through rates, and this is the total click-through rates of the queries. So this is the percentage of people that clicked on anything, not just one specific result. Eighty-five of these keywords, so over 10% of these keywords, they had a total click-through rate for all results of under 20%, meaning the vast majority of people clicked on nothing.

Only about a third of these keywords, slightly over a third of these keywords had a total number of clicks that were similar to the search volume, 81% to 100% of the search volume. So this is really interesting because there's a wild spread here, and this varies a lot from one keyword sample to the next. Basically what this means is that just knowing about volume doesn't mean you actually know about clicks, any more at least.

So this is a bit of a problem when we're using search volume as a metric. We kind of have to use, but there are maybe some issues. 

Click-through rate

So how can we get around that? So, as I've just talked about, one thing we can look at is click-through rate in combination with search volume. So I just said, in Moz, you can look at the total click-through rate of a query, but you can also look in Search Console at the click-through rate just for your specific result where you've ranked now.

So that can help you to have a better idea for the sort of actual opportunity that comes with a keyword rather than just search volume, which basically doesn't give you much of a clue about that on its own. So you can use these together to get a better idea. 

Keyword difficulty

The last metric I want to talk about that you can use with these is difficulty.

So keyword difficulty is a metric we have in Moz. Some other tools have similar things. What we do is we take the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the other results that are ranking for that keyword to get an idea of sort of how tough the table stakes are for this competition. Then we also look at the click-through rate, the total click-through rate of that query, like I was just talking about.

So this gives you an idea of how dominated this SERP is going to be perhaps by Google features or something like that. Then together this forms our difficulty score. So this gives you an idea of the level of opportunity here. So when you use all three of these together, you can say, "Okay, I've got this many searches and this click-through rate, so I know how many clicks are available. Then with the difficulty, I know how many of these clicks I might actually be able to win."

So that's all. Relatively quick and simple one. Hope you found that useful. Let us know on social, and I'm sure we'll have more of these coming right up. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

TikTok SEO: Understanding the TikTok Algorithm

TikTok has quickly become a viral sensation, with millions of users across the globe spending hours scrolling through the app's endless supply of videos. But for marketers, TikTok's greatest asset lies in its algorithm.

In the first chapter of this series, we dug into the search behavior on TikTok and why it should matter to SEOs. In this article, we are going to cover the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm, and how to leverage it to get more users looking at your brand’s content.

The principles behind the TikTok algorithm

Before we dig into the algorithm’s ranking factors, a bit of background.

In 2020, TikTok’s CEO Kevin Mayer published a manifesto on the importance of transparency for tech companies, especially when it comes to their content algorithms. Mayer committed to being more open than its competitors, indirectly challenging Meta and Google.

Luckily for us marketers, TikTok has kept its promise and has some solid documentation on how their algorithm works. In this article, I will be combining that information along with secondary sources and inference based on general social media principles.

Surfacing interesting topics

A few months ago, I was raving about TikTok to my partner. He is big on privacy and didn’t love the idea of joining the platform, but I convinced him.

The moment he joined the app, his feed was flooded with bikini-clad teenagers, crude physical “humor” and what I can just describe as a bunch of British guys acting very lad-y. All the platform knew about him is that he is young(-ish), male, and British.

The content TikTok was serving was based on his demographic data. The algorithm hadn’t had time to work its magic then, but when it did, he could hardly put down his phone.

TikTok collects data on how users interact with different videos. Based on this information, TikTok can determine a user's interests and serve them related content.

TikTok uses the content of each video to understand what topic it pertains to. This is based on the use of hashtags, video descriptions, the TikTok sound used, and the textual spoken audio. Based on what we know about other platforms’ natural language processing capabilities, this is likely more effective in English than in other languages.

The platform gets better at tailoring this content for you as you engage with it, but it also bases its recommendations on demographic data such as gender, age, and location.

According to their privacy policy, TikTok adds “inferred information” to your profile, such as age-range, gender, and interests.

Knowing this, it would make sense that TikTok puts audiences into different interest cohorts. By connecting different topics by how closely related they are, TikTok should be able to surface topics you’re likely to enjoy, even if you’ve never engaged with them on the platform before.

Let’s see an example. I like interior design, so I’m likely into IKEA hacks, which means I’m likely into DIY. If I’m into home improvements, I’m likely into crafting. Boom, a cross-stitching video reached my feed, and I love it.

@tiktokswithtom Cross stitch 🤷‍♂️ #fyp#fypシ#foryou#crossstitch#crossstitchoftiktok♬ Che La Luna - Louis Prima with Sam Butera & The Witnesses

Bursting the filter bubble effect

TikTok’s transparency policy came about after receiving some criticism around how their algorithm creates echo chambers that promote radicalization and the spread of misinformation. Now some platform representatives have spoken about how the platform is trying to prevent that.

Youtube and Facebook have come under fire for this before, but the truth is that any platform with a content discovery algorithm that relies on engagement is susceptible to creating echo chambers and promoting radicalization. Human psychology tells us that we’re more likely to engage with content that elicits a strong emotional reaction. This incentivizes content creators to promote content that makes us angry or afraid.

TikTok’s answer to the filter bubble effect has been somewhat simple: the platform will show you random content from time to time.

In order to avoid homogeneity of content, the app has started showing users content that they don’t usually engage with. This includes surfacing random hashtags, video aesthetics, sounds, and topics. The app tries to keep things fresh by avoiding content repetition, so you’re unlikely to see two videos by the same creator or using the same sound in a row.

Another interesting incorporation into the algorithm is showing you fresh content that has not had any engagement yet. If you’re a TikTok user, I’m sure you have noticed this.

Is this enough to prevent creating echo chambers? Probably not. Familiarity or the mere exposure effect will make you engage with the content you see most frequently, so there’s still a pretty high chance of developing echo chambers.

According to the teachings of one of my favorite psychology textbooks, we’d need to see about 50% of this random content on our feed to break the behavioral learning and bias towards what we already like. Obviously that would be against the business interests of most social media platforms, so it seems unlikely to happen.

With this background and context in mind, let’s dig into TikTok’s ranking factors.

TikTok ranking factors

As I mentioned above, this list of ranking factors is based on a mix of TikTok-confirmed features as well as unofficial sources and general social media practices.

1. Video engagement

One TikTok ranking factor is engagement, which includes likes and comments as well as watch time and profile visits. When a TikTok video has a high level of engagement, it means people are taking the time to interact and engage with the content.

This also includes replays, follows, bookmarks, and tagging a video as "not interested" (which affects your video negatively, of course). Engagement shows TikTok that the content is worth pushing out to more users, thereby helping it rank higher on TikTok's algorithm.

Not all forms of engagement are created equal, of course. A comment or share are stronger engagement indicators than a like. We see this on TikTok’s documentation and it’s true in many other social media platforms too.

According to TikTok’s documentation, engagement is measured at video level, not at account level.

The profiles a user follows on TikTok also contribute to determining the user’s interest profile. Following gardening accounts indicates to the algorithm even further that you’re interested in gardening videos.

The follower count or the previous performance of an account doesn’t directly impact the rankings of their videos. However, having a high follower count can indirectly help your videos perform better, as it will expose them to more eyes through your followers. If your followers engage with your content, that engagement can help you reach bigger audiences.

This is a big shift from classic forms of social media marketing, were the previous performance of posts on a profile are thought to influence the reach that future posts will have.

2. Discover tab engagement

Another way in which TikTok determines a user’s potential interest in a video is by analyzing their interactions with TikTok content beyond just video. Searching, clicking on a hashtag, exploring a trending topic, or viewing videos from a specific sound will weigh towards the video recommendations that users receive on their For You feed.

3. The content of the videos

As an SEO, I can’t help but draw a parallel between on-page SEO and the TikTok ranking factors within the video content.

For the platform to be able to recommend videos of topics that you like, it needs to understand what each of the videos are about.

There are several elements within the uploaded videos that help the app understand what topic and emotional tone each video has. Let’s take a look at what those elements are:

• The video’s visuals. According to their privacy policy, TikTok can “detect and collect characteristics and features about the video and audio recordings” by identifying objects, scenery, and what body parts are present in your video. This is used for content moderation and to power their recommendations algorithm.

• The audio. The platform can process the “text of words spoken” within your videos to further understand what they’re about.

• Text over the video. Using text over the video also contributes to that understanding of the content. Adding the text natively within the platform might provide a stronger signal, based on the way other content ranking algorithms work.

• Title and hashtags. This is the OG signal for TikTok and it’s the one they’ve publicly discussed the most. The title and hashtags used in the video help tell TikTok what the video is about, but they can also influence rankings indirectly by affecting engagement and discovery.

• TikTok sounds. The sound being used in a video is a ranking factor on its own, as it helps the platform understand a video’s content. But the biggest way in which sounds affect your content’s performance is jumping on a trend. Trending sounds get a ranking boost for a short while, since they can predict user engagement.

4. Content language

There are three language preferences you can set in your account: app language, preferred languages, and translation language. This should be pretty self-explanatory, but there is an interesting aspect to explore here.

You can select several preferred languages and TikTok prompts you to select the languages you understand. However, you can only select one language for your app and one for your automatic content translations. It would not surprise me if TikTok used those settings to establish which of your preferred languages is actually your favorite.

5. Device suitability

TikTok explains in their documentation that the user’s device matters in the videos that users get shown, but they have not specified exactly how.

According to TikTok, the information they receive about your device is anything from user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, model and operating system,and network type to screen resolution, battery state, or audio settings.

My guess is that older and slower devices get shown shorter and lighter videos more often, to prevent disrupting the user experience if the phone’s performance can’t keep up.

6. Creator locality

There is one line on TikTok’s official documentation that really caught my eye:

“A strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end, would receive greater weight than a weak indicator, such as whether the video's viewer and creator are both in the same country.”

There isn’t a lot of clarity about how location is used as a ranking factor, but we know it exists. We can understand that proximity between viewers and creators helps in ranking, but we don’t know at what level this is measured.

TikTok tracks user location through SIM card information, IP address, and, if you give your permission, GPS.

7. Ineligible content

TikTok has two ways of moderating content: removing it or making it ineligible to rank. These include your usual suspects such as violence, nudity, and hate speech, along with some others.

There are some interesting types of content that are ineligible to appear in the For You page:

• Content uploaded by users under 16 — so don’t use your company’s actual age to make an account.

• Content that includes QR codes — TikTok wants to know what you’re linking out to and get a piece of the cake if it’s a product recommendation.

• Content that manipulates users into engaging with the video or user — all that “tap the screen twice to see something magical” stays on Instagram.

• Duplicated content from TikTok or other platforms where the user doesn’t add any significant creative edits.

• Dangerous stunts not performed by professionals.

• Content that features tobacco.

8. Native content creation

I am pretty confident that building content using TikTok’s native tooling can help boost your content ranking. Other social media platforms tend to favor native content and native content creation in their algorithm, so it would make sense for TikTok to do the same. For the sake of transparency, this is just an educated guess and not an official ranking factor.

Instagram, for example, has improved their native video creation tools for Reels and Stories while demoting content with watermarks from other platforms. Facebook favors native video over Youtube embeds. LinkedIn favors posts without external links while offering a native blog platform.

TikTok’s own analysis shows that companies who used their native creative tools saw 14 times more engagement than those who didn’t.

There is an indirect mechanism that could lead to native TikTok videos performing better: the familiarity of users with the type of content the app can produce natively. Users are very quick to spot an overproduced video as an ad and will tend to engage with it a lot less. This blog post on TikTok for Business supports that theory, by telling brands: “don’t make ads, make TikToks”.

TL;DR

In conclusion, the TikTok algorithm aims to show you content you’ll find interesting while avoiding filter bubbles.

Based on the user's interactions with the app, TikTok is able to suggest videos that the user might be interested in. This is done through analyzing likes, comments, watch time, replays, follows, and bookmarks. The app is also able to understand the content of the videos through visuals, audio, text, and hashtags. Additionally, TikTok takes into account the language preferences, device information, and locations of both the user and the creator when suggesting videos.

What unique strategies have you implemented to perform well on TikTok? Share with us @LidiaInfanteM and @Moz on Twitter, and be on the lookout for part three of this TikTok SEO series: how to rank in 2022.