Carlos says: “In this moment, as AI is doing all of the text content creation, we should move to create our content calendars based on short videos, especially, and not only text content. Join this new trend of short videos, and making sure we create relevant content.”

Is this for every type of content?

“Yeah, I think that all kinds of content must be created with video – not only just video but complemented with text. At the moment our users prefer consuming our content as video, short video or long video, but definitely in video form.”

Do you think short-form and long-form video are entirely different forms of content or can you get away with creating short-form content from long-form content?

“Well, it's a good question. I think that we can choose both.

People are getting used to consuming all videos on their mobile phones. Eventually, even the longest ones are going to be consumed on a mobile phone in portrait. All videos are eventually going to be recorded and consumed in vertical mode.”

Are there any particular platforms that you favour for publishing on?

“Anyone who is publishing their short videos on TikTok is feeling and getting this incredible organic reach that I couldn't see on Facebook, for example, more than 10 years ago. Right now, the best platform to publish video and get results from is TikTok.”

Are there many types of businesses that tend to be successful on TikTok or is it only certain types of businesses?

“It depends on how you want to create your video content there. When I started creating content on TikTok, I saw that there was not only one kind of content that you might think is not for your brand.

For example, there's a lot of interesting content on how to do things and there's a lot of content about digital marketing. It's not just people dancing and singing and doing these trends, but they also have really high-value content there. It's just the TikTok algorithm that is going to show your users the content that they want.

It's okay that you are seeing a specific kind of video. Then the algorithm will start switching to more brand videos, or more elaborate videos, not just funny content. I think the platform can fit almost any brand.”

How do you measure SEO success from content that's published on TikTok?

“The way to measure success is the same as you can see success in any kind of content. For example, when you create text content, the way that you are going to measure that is the same as it is for video.

If your main goal is to drive traffic to your website, instead of people reading an article it’s going to be people watching a video, but the goal is going to be the same. Also, if you are a brand that is selling a product or a service, you can also use video in order to help users choose your product or service. In that area, you can measure how this video has participated in your conversion funnel.”

How do you know that traffic has come from TikTok when a lot of this is brand exposure and people are often more likely to type your brand into Google?

“That's a really good question because the main problem that the TikTok platform has at the moment is that you can’t place a link in any of your videos. It's a bit tricky. You have to use your profile and link there using a link tree or whatever. In that URL, they have a way to send people to different links that should be included in each video.

So it's a bit tricky. It's not easy to get those people on TikTok to visit your website, but I've done several tests, and I've seen that it's possible to drive a really decent amount of traffic from your TikTok profile link to your website.”

Should marketers be concerned that they don't have full control over what the customer does and where they interact, with third-party domains and platforms like these?

“Although the ideal platform would give us that opportunity, there is still an opportunity to get a really high volume of traffic from a platform like this. You are missing some control over what the users are doing there.

If you are ultimately getting brand searches in other search areas, or improving your sales, it's not really possible to track all of the users on all the different platforms that they are using. In my tests, I have seen that this lack of information is not really important, if you are able to get enough users from this platform.”

Is there a particular stage of the buyer journey that people tend to use TikTok for? Is it only the early stages or can it be the purchasing and decision-making stage?

“I think both. There are two main algorithms inside TikTok, and two main different sections. The one that most people use is the For You section, where you're just consuming TikTok like you're watching TV, and changing to the next channel. They are consuming content in a very passive way – they’re swiping and swiping and they’re not asking for anything.

You also have, as we have seen for several of our clients, that there's a lot of people who are looking for places – especially restaurants and travel destinations – and they are planning to travel, go to dinner, or go out to places in a really transactional stage of their funnel. I don't think that it's just for the top-of-the-funnel users that you can have an impact.”

What would be the second most prominent platform that you'd recommend?

“For us, after TikTok, it’s YouTube. If your focus is on getting users, especially from search, then YouTube should be your second channel because it's the easiest way to complement your website with an external platform. You can guarantee that they are going to rank because Google is promoting it a lot.”

Are you publishing the same videos on there or is it an entirely different type of video?

“We've seen that, on YouTube, it works better when you have videos that the users are looking for.

Both YouTube search and Google search are the main way of getting users to view your content – unless you are a big influencer and you have a large community who is waiting to watch your videos. What we are using is more SEO-related content strategies. YouTube and a mix of SEO and that not-so-SEO way of thinking more about what people would like to see for TikTok.”

How did you start to build a video SEO strategy?

“In the first place, you have to know or guess what your users want to see. Once you have an idea, you have to try it out – especially on TikTok. On YouTube, there's a lot of information and it's easier to know what trending searches you can focus on. You can create videos based on that. But, on TikTok, you don't have this data.

My way of doing it is using external data and trying what I think is going to work, also using the TikTok search and the suggestions, as we did as SEOs a long time ago when there wasn’t as much information as now.

If you are paying for ads, you need to have a really clear idea of who you are going to show your content to. However, since this is organic content that most people are going to see, the best way to test it is to have a lot of people consume it.”

Do you have a follow-up strategy to produce content for your own website, such as producing the transcript and publishing that on your site?

“We do almost the same, but with one difference. At the moment, we don’t think you need to put the transcription because of something really interesting that most people don't know. That is, TikTok is indexing all their videos.

Although you visit that video on the platform, you can see the transcription of what that person is saying, and Google is reading it and it's ranking for the content that a person is saying in their video. At the moment, if you embed that video (a TikTok video or a YouTube Shorts video) on your website, you don't need the transcript.

We’ve done this in previous years, adding in the transcription of the video and either placing it or even adding some extra information – some links and other things that can add value to that content.

One thing that we say to our clients in our agency is that creating content is hard. You are investing not necessarily much money, but a lot of time. You can’t just use it as a one-shot piece of content that you only publish on one website or platform. Try to get the most out of each piece of content.”

How do you differentiate yourself from other brands? What makes a particular brand's video more unique and more engaging?

“What we are using for this at the moment is not just having brands create content for themselves, but having people create content for the brands.

Not only customers but also other content creators that fit with the target user.

For example, instead of just creating a high-production video with a lot of editing, also show real people talking about the brand, even though it was paid for by the brand. That is a really successful way of differentiating yourself from other brands.”

What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“SEOs shouldn't keep improving all their URLs by adding text to them, as if the longest text in the URL is going to get the best rank on Google. What we have seen, especially with the last updates, is that you don't need a lot of content in each URL, and you need to answer the search intent in each keyword you want to rank for.

Stop adding more and more text, and optimising by adding text. Instead of that, start removing this extra text that’s just made for Google. I think you are going to see your ranks improve.”

If you've got a page that's ranking at the bottom of Page 1 of Google's SERP, should you be tinkering with that, removing content, and trying to get it to rank higher?

“If you haven't done this before, you should start. You are not getting clicks. One thing that we see in our agency (and say to our clients) is that, if you're not getting clicks from a query, it doesn't matter if it's ranked 5 or 50 – you need to make some changes there.

Instead of adding more text to optimise it, try to remove text and see what happens. If you are over-optimised, removing text might help you get better rankings.”

Carlos Estevez is COO at Internet República, and you can find him over at InternetRepublica.com.