Step outside the comfort zone of traditional platforms

Ed says: “SEO needs to be everything, everywhere, all at once – and at all times.”

Does that mean everything in marketing, everything in business, or everything in the world?

“Definitely everything in marketing. Gone are the days when SEO was solely split into on-site (your content work, blogs, landing pages, commercial pages, etc.) and then just having off-site reserved for digital PR and typical link building strategies. We've very much gone beyond the idea of those being the most important things in SEO.

Now you need to go where your users are. This also ties into the idea of passive marketing and getting in front of your audience at all times, even when they're not necessarily looking for your products or services.

With apps like TikTok, short-form video content has over a billion users a month, and YouTube has over 122 million users every day on its platform. Making sure that you cover every medium imaginable with your content is almost a necessity with how the world has changed, and how internet behaviour and consumer behaviour have pivoted with it.

We've got more information available at our fingertips than ever before, but the way that we digest and use content is changing rapidly. Even simple things, such as looking for a recipe. Previously, you'd read a 2,000-3,000-word blog article all about the history of that recipe before you got the information that you wanted and needed, like ingredients and cooking time. Now, it's readily available in AI overviews, and that information needs to be lifted from somewhere.

As another example, for tutorials on how to change a tyre, users are heading straight to YouTube or TikTok to get that answer within the smallest timescale possible. They’re looking for a 45-second video telling you exactly how to do it and what tools you need, as opposed to landing on a website and reading a 3,000-word article that would take a lot more time and involvement from the user.”

Why is it an SEO's job to advise on publishing on YouTube and TikTok?

“Wherever there's a search bar, an SEO should be involved. There's a lot of optimization that goes into how you position your titles, your hashtags, and your video descriptions.

You can also use keyword data to see what your users are actually searching for, so that you can serve them the best quality content – whether it's on your website, your YouTube, your TikTok, etc. You can see what the demand is, and you can create and curate content that satisfies that demand, whilst also having the greatest opportunity to pull short-form videos into Google search results anyway.

Something that we're seeing as much more of an emerging trend is that short-form videos from TikTok and YouTube are being lifted directly onto the SERPs. Anything that involves the SERPs, as we know, is generally an SEO's job (unless it's a paid advert).

It’s about making sure that you have the greatest visibility and input across topics, questions and answers, and also optimization across whatever platform you're servicing content on. That is the role of an SEO, to at least have input and steer the ship for these platforms.”

Is it about being everywhere or just being in the places where your audience is most likely to be, and publishing content that's hyper relevant to that platform?

“Exactly that.

With the content that you would use on the likes of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, because it’s very much about trending topics, it’s more of a brand visibility piece – unless you're actively offering something.

If you're an e-commerce business that sells clothes, you can do recommended outfits, or if you're a SaaS business, you can explain the benefits of your platform or address an issue and pain point that needs solving. You could say, ‘With us, you can speed up the process of extracting data or sorting through spreadsheets.’ Anything like that gives immediate value or answers a question.

At Swoop Funding, we're offering insights on how to start a business and how to get funding for businesses, and our TikTok and YouTube shorts at the moment are going through all of the grants that are available, the ways that you can actually start up a business, how to market your business without much capital behind you, how you can use influencers to push that business, etc.

It's making sure that you are discoverable at all times. If you can get in front of prospective customers at a time when they're not necessarily looking for your service, when they do come to look for it, you're front of mind because you're a brand that they're familiar with. It's very much a brand exposure exercise as well as generating visibility and KPIs in terms of impressions, clicks, saves, etc.

It gives you a multifaceted approach, and it’s a very holistic approach to SEO, so it's not just reserved for your website.”

Should every brand be publishing video on TikTok?

“Absolutely – even just from a brand visibility perspective. There will be some very extreme examples that don't quite fit into this, but no matter what kind of service you offer, just having that presence grows your digital footprint.

It's another platform for you to demonstrate your expertise, your authority, and what the service is, but it can also allow you to have a bit of fun with the brand. Some incredible businesses absolutely kill it on socials. On Twitter, Aldi has managed to humourize being a supermarket chain that has a lot of dupes for products.

With Duolingo on TikTok, none of their videos have anything to do with learning a new language, but they've really humourized their mascot. They've made it such an incredible, captivating piece of content that, if you ever want to look for a tool to help you learn a new language, they're front of your mind because they've got so much going for their brand.

It doesn't have to just be corporate the whole time; these platforms (especially the likes of TikTok) allow you to add a bit of humour into your marketing. Your messaging on-site can be very sales-oriented, because the website is ultimately that conversion point now. Social media channels can give your brand a voice, but also give your audience something that they can engage with. A bit of humour goes a long way in marketing.

Even if you are in finance and business in general, while the target demographic for TikTok is that 14-18 range, they're going to be the next generation of business owners and university graduates. It’s adding to the life cycle of your audience and your customers. If you can get in front of them now, there's repeatability in the future.

Also, if this is where consumer behaviour is going and users are using the platforms more, and we're seeing a lot more AI overviews for that top-of-funnel content, this is an opportunity to capture that audience on a different platform – away from Google.”

How do you measure the organic success of publishing content that has little to do with the core proposition of what your product or your service is about?

“You can track it in analytics by having, say, the amount of click-through that you have from your TikTok channel or YouTube account.

Ultimately, you can target your strategy. For example, if we're chatting about business grants, we might direct users to the business grant section of our website. We can then track the impressions increased, and the amount of referral traffic we've got from these platforms.

You can also just measure the brand as a whole, almost taking that share of search and brand visibility perspective. If you’ve been consistently running a video strategy for 12 weeks, you can use tools like Google Trends to get an idea of the increase in visibility and demand for the branded keyword because more people are becoming aware of you.

It allows you to track the visibility of the brand, see the demand for the services, and also view the referral traffic that you get from these platforms – or just in general. You can track the increases, see if there's a trend that you can analyse, and also see if your average search volumes for your branded keywords increase over time as well, as more and more people start to go direct.

That's part of where SEO is headed. The previous metrics that we used to use are changing rapidly, because less traffic is getting sent to websites, and more traffic is going to the open web and resulting in zero-click searches. These platforms almost bridge the gap that we used to have directly to the website.

Again, visibility is everything. That’s why you need to be everywhere and anywhere, all at once, just to make sure that you have the greatest possibility of getting in front of your prospective customers.”

Do you try and use EEAT principles as part of the content you publish on social media, and if so, how do you go about doing that?

“Absolutely. This is where both short-form and long-form content can really come into their own.

If you have author bios and a team section on your website, you already have the digital footprint of these experts that you can use. Making them the figureheads of your content and having them involved is a great opportunity to solidify EEAT on another platform, especially if it's an explainer top-of-funnel or it’s covering topical and reactive news stories.

What's great about these social media platforms now is the idea of influencers and how you can capitalise on their expertise through partnerships and have them verify your business. You get to piggyback on their digital footprint and their expertise, and your brand then becomes associated with them.

It's another form of campaign where you can use internal and external experts. Having that mix adds to credibility, authority, and ultimately trustworthiness, because you have multiple verified sources confirming the same information and collaborating. Taking that holistic approach to everything allows you to demonstrate expertise while also being an authority and a trustworthy source.

If this is your first foray into video content, using experts and established individuals or teams who are already out there is a good way to hit the ground running. We know it's going to be a bit of an uphill battle if you haven't had a video strategy in the past. Budget constraints are also a big deal, and if you've never had the budget to allocate resources into video content, you are very much going to be starting from absolute zero.

Having these experts who are already established and have their own audience is a great opportunity – and it works across every industry. Even in spaces like healthcare, e-commerce, and anything like that, there's somebody out there who has a large following, and you can tap into their audience and use it as a starting point to launch your brand on these platforms.”

How do you know which influencers are likely to be best for your brand, and how do you approach them?

“A great way to do this is to use hashtags as a search tool on TikTok to find accounts that pop up for multiple things. Then, when you go onto their profile page, if you click through their videos, you get a search banner at the top, which has related topics. If that related topic matches the industry or sector that you're in, you know that this person and their content are geared towards that industry.

For instance, if you were discussing clothing as an e-commerce brand and you were going through influencers who post their outfits of the day, run through the brands that they're wearing, or discuss their essential must-haves for the season, you get an idea of the type of content that they produce.

You can see the metrics very visibly for what they are achieving in terms of views, likes, shares, comments, saves, etc. These are the new KPIs for this kind of content.

Then you can just reach out to them and say, ‘This is the position we're in, we'd like to collaborate with you,’ and it opens up that communication. Larger influencers have media packs available on their link trees in their bios, so it's a very easy and collaborative approach.

A lot of people are up for the chat, and you can work out a method that works for you – whether it's on a referral customer basis or if they have an affiliate code that they get a kickback from. There are so many different ways that you can approach it that work for the business and the influencer themselves.”

Ed, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Don't be afraid of being on multiple platforms.

Users are changing the way that they use the internet. Short-form video is something that is becoming increasingly popular, and making sure that you have content on all of these platforms is the best opportunity for your business to get surfaced.”

Ed Ziubrzynski is Global SEO and Content Manager at Swoop Funding. Find out more over at SwoopFunding.com.