TikTok keyword research: a step-by-step method

TikTok keyword research is six steps: start with seeds from your niche, collect TikTok's autocomplete suggestions, look up the real 7-day search counts in Creator Search Insights, expand with related topics, check how many videos already compete, then pick one typed search and write the video around its exact wording. Creator Search Insights is TikTok's free source of those counts, in the app and on desktop, one topic at a time with no export. Advertisers also get TikTok's Keyword Planner in Ads Manager. In our cleaning example, "wd 40 cleaning hacks" had 281,415 searches in the 7 days to 19 September 2026 and no videos matched to it.

Everything below is worked on that niche, and every number is in a snapshot you can open. Copy the sheet at the bottom and you have your own list by the end of the afternoon.

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<a href="https://tokconnect.com/guides/tiktok-keyword-research/"><img src="https://tokconnect.com/graphics/tiktok-keyword-research/summary.png" alt="TikTok keyword research on one niche: 281K 7-day searches for &quot;wd 40 cleaning hacks&quot;, 0 videos; 2 of 12 topics for &quot;cleaning hacks&quot; were typed searches; 165K searches for &quot;cleaning trash bins for money&quot;" width="1200" height="630" style="max-width:100%;height:auto"></a><br>Source: <a href="https://tokconnect.com/guides/tiktok-keyword-research/">TikTok Keyword Research: A Step-by-Step Method</a> on TokConnect

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Step 1: seeds from your niche, not from a trend list

Write down five to ten plain phrases that describe what you film. Not hashtags, not slogans. The words a stranger would type to find your video.

For a cleaning account: cleaning hacks, laundry, bathroom cleaning, declutter, stain removal, room decor. Broad is fine at this stage. The next two steps do the narrowing, and starting broad stops you from missing whole branches of demand because you already decided what the answer was.

Skip anything you cannot film. A keyword you can't answer on camera is somebody else's keyword.

Step 2: TikTok's autocomplete, one seed at a time

Type a seed into the TikTok search bar and stop. The list that drops down is real query data. It costs nothing and most creators never write it down.

Data: TikTok search suggestions. Cleaning and laundry snapshot; room decor and 19 more seeds in the 5 October snapshot.

Two things fall out immediately. The room-by-room split (kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) is how people narrow a cleaning search, so each room is a video. And laundry turns out to be two audiences: people doing laundry and people starting a laundry business. One seed, two content plans. More on mining these at scale in the search suggestions guide.

What autocomplete will not give you is volume. Every suggestion looks equally important. That is the next step.

Step 3: real search counts from Creator Search Insights

TikTok publishes search numbers in a free tool it launched in March 2024. Search Creator Search Insights in the app and tap View, or log in at tiktok.com/csi, then use its search bar on your seed. Each topic comes back with a search count for the last seven days, global unless you set a country, plus the number of videos TikTok has matched to it.

Most of what comes back is not what people type. For the seed cleaning hacks, 10 of the 12 topics were TikTok's generated topic groups, such as "cleaning hacks for smelly trash bins", with pooled figures between 2,541,628 and 9,126,134 that cover many related searches. Don't plan on those figures or use them as keywords. The typed searches are the ones to work with:

Data: TikTok Creator Search Insights, pulled 19 September 2026, global. Open the snapshot.

Read the columns like this. 7-day searches is a weekly count, not a monthly one, so it is a different scale from a Google volume for the same phrase; TikTok vs Google search explains the gap. Videos is how many videos TikTok has matched to that search; a 0 there is the content gap signal. Popularity is TikTok's own 0 to 100 index. Full definitions are in the search volume guide.

The standout is "wd 40 cleaning hacks": 281,415 searches in a week, rising almost every day, with no videos matched to it. That is a one-take video about a product most people already own.

Step 4: expand with related topics

Open any topic and TikTok offers related ones with their own numbers. Off the trash-bin topic group we got three typed searches: cleaning trash bins for money (164,549 searches, 0 videos), Things to clean (96,528, 0 videos) and Cleaning Service (22,597, 0 videos). The first is a whole content angle nobody in the niche had suggested: bin cleaning as a side business.

Filter the list by category before you trust it, because unrelated topics get mixed in; "honest review of cheap bakery finds" showed up next to the cleaning ones. Keep whatever survives the filter and repeat the step on your next-biggest search. Three passes usually gets you twenty usable phrases.

Step 5: check what you would be up against

A zero in the videos column means TikTok has matched no videos to that search, not that nothing on TikTok mentions the subject. Before you commit, search the phrase the way a viewer would and look at the results.

For cleaning hacks kitchen, the seven results we pulled ran from 149,465 to 4,459,673 views, and the ones near the top carried the words in the caption or the tags: #CleaningHacks, #KitchenCleaning, #CleanTok. That matches what TikTok says it reads, since it names captions, sounds and hashtags among its recommendation signals. It is also a crowded query: beatable, but you need a better answer, not just the right words.

Compare that with "wd 40 cleaning hacks", where nothing is matched at all. Same niche, two very different amounts of work. Do this check on your shortlist only, or it eats the afternoon.

Step 6: pick one and map it to a video

Choose on three things: enough searches to matter, few enough videos to beat, and something you can film this week. In this niche that is wd 40 cleaning hacks.

Then put the search's wording in the three places TikTok reads, without twisting your sentences into keyword soup.

• First spoken line: "Five WD-40 cleaning hacks that have nothing to do with squeaky hinges."
• On-screen text, seconds 0 to 2: WD-40 cleaning hacks
• Caption, first line: WD-40 cleaning hacks: sticker residue, crayon on walls, and the one that surprised me.
• Hashtags: #cleaninghacks #cleantok #wd40

That is one video. The rest of the sheet is your next five. The TikTok SEO guide covers what happens after you post.

A TikTok keyword research template you can copy

Six columns, one row per keyword. Paste this into a sheet and replace our example rows with yours. Keep the source column accurate: an autocomplete phrase with no count next to it is a guess, and a topic group's figure is not a count for that phrase, so neither belongs in the searches column.

Numbers from TikTok Creator Search Insights and TikTok search, pulled 19 September 2026. Open the snapshot.

TikTok Keyword Planner: the Search Ads route

TikTok Keyword Planner is the keyword tool inside TikTok Ads Manager, built for planning Search Ads campaigns. TikTok calls it "a centralized planning tool" and says it shows search volume, competition, and scale and performance predictions "before committing your budget" (TikTok Help Center). When we asked a logged-out ChatGPT on 5 October 2026 for the best tool to see TikTok search volume, Keyword Planner was its first answer. It is a good answer for advertisers. For organic planning, the six steps above use the counts creators see.

How to access it

1. Log in to TikTok Ads Manager, open the Tools tab and click Keyword planner (TikTok's steps).
2. On the Keyword ideas tab, type a keyword and click Discover.
3. Save the keywords you want to a keyword plan. For a long list, use Saved keyword plans > Add keywords > Upload with TikTok's template (source).
4. In your ad group's Keywords section, choose Import > From Keyword Plan (source).

If your Ads Manager account's home country is supported, the tool "is available by default"; if not, TikTok says access "may be enabled via allowlist". The help pages we read on 5 October 2026 mention no fee and no spend minimum. An ad group can hold up to 1,000 keywords and 10,000 negative keywords (source).

Its 12 markets, and what TikTok has not published

Keyword Planner lists 12 targeting markets as of 5 October 2026: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. TikTok's Search Ads availability page (updated April 2026) names 11 of them, without the UAE. TikTok search is worldwide, though: of 100 autocomplete suggestions we pulled for 10 product keywords, 16 named a place outside those markets or were in Burmese.

The help pages do not say whether the volume is monthly, weekly or a range, how far back it goes, or whether you can export a plan. So don't compare a planner volume with Creator Search Insights' 7-day count. Creative Center's Keyword Insights is a third tool again: TikTok says its list comes from ads and "does not reflect organic content rankings".

What the organic counts add for advertisers

We ran 10 product keywords an advertiser might bid on through Creator Search Insights on 5 October 2026 and kept only typed searches. 7 of the 9 biggest had no videos matched, so organic results were thin exactly where people were typing.

Data: TikTok Creator Search Insights, pulled 5 October 2026, global 7-day searches. Of the 200 topics returned, 70 were typed searches and 130 were TikTok topic groups, left out here. Topics, autocomplete, 30-day series.

The typed wording is specific: a size (64oz), a flavour (cherry), a how-to (turn on). Those make better exact-match keywords than a brand name alone. Intent also gets mixed: "stanley cup" returned ice hockey searches such as "2018 stanley cup", and "sol de janeiro" returned mostly Rio de Janeiro travel topics. Those are your negative keywords. Timing matters too: the daily reading for "kindle vs kindle paperwhite" rose from 11,549 on 5 September to 330,065 on 5 October 2026, while "how to turn on dyson airwrap" read zero on 19 September and 298,649 on 5 October, so check a month before you commit budget. And the United States made up 99.7% of 30-day searches for "owala 64oz water bottle", with no UK series returned, which is the per-market check Keyword Planner is for.

Checked 5 October 2026 on TikTok's help pages and KeywordTool.io's pricing page. All facts with links: facts file.

The free route and the faster ones

Free, by hand. The TikTok app gives you autocomplete and Creator Search Insights at no cost, and TikTok's Creator Academy lists 40 countries where the tool works in English. The limits are real: there is no export and no history, in the app or at tiktok.com/csi, and the Suggested tab is personalised to your account. Budget twenty minutes a seed, screenshot everything, and type the numbers into your sheet yourself.

With a keyword tool. KeywordTool.io pulls hundreds of TikTok autocomplete phrases per seed, which is faster than typing, and adds estimated volumes on paid plans; our KeywordTool.io review checks those estimates against TikTok's own counts. Advertisers can open TikTok's Keyword Planner in Ads Manager, covered below.

Try the free SEO and keyword tool

Free tool. The SEO & keyword tool runs steps 2 to 4 for one seed.

With an agent. The six steps are six data pulls, so an agent connected to TikTok's data can run them and hand back the finished table. To pull TikTok's own counts for a whole seed list at once, TokConnect reads Creator Search Insights, autocomplete and TikTok search, and starts with 50 free credits. The tools comparison puts all the routes side by side.

Either way, redo it monthly. Search counts move week to week, and a list from March is a list of last spring's problems.

How we got these numbers

Every TikTok figure on this page was pulled through TokConnect's MCP server. We pulled the cleaning niche on 19 September 2026: search_suggestions for "cleaning hacks" and "laundry" (10 each), search_topics for "cleaning hacks" (12 topics), related_topics for the trash-bin topic group, and search_videos for "cleaning hacks kitchen" (7 videos). The room decor suggestions come from our 5 October 2026 autocomplete pull. Searches are TikTok's search popularity over the 7 days to 19 September 2026, global; videos is how many videos TikTok matches to the search; video views are play counts on the day.

A record counts as a topic group, not a typed search, if its 7-day figure is 5,000,000 or more, or 1,000,000 or more with the week's first reading under 5% of its last, or TikTok files it as Featured Content, or its wording is a descriptive group rather than something people type (as with "Easy cleaning hacks for tough messes"). Groups are left out of every table, chart and key statistic. The Keyword Planner section's product data was pulled on 5 October 2026 with search_topics (20 topics) and search_suggestions (10) for each of 10 product keywords chosen before we saw results, then search_popularity with a 30-day window for three typed searches; Keyword Planner facts come from TikTok's help pages read the same day. TikTok samples and rounds these figures. Data: cleaning pull, product topics, Keyword Planner facts, autocomplete, 5 October, TikTok facts with links.