What’s changed since I ran my social SEO workshop (and the tools I’m using now)
Back in July last year, I ran a workshop on the new short-form video update: Google had started indexing Instagram Reels. Your Reels could show up in Google search results, not just in the app. It was big news to many, and the room was full of people trying to work out what it meant for them.
A lot has moved on since then, and almost a year on, it feels like the right moment to revisit it. I want to share what’s changed, why social SEO matters more than most people realise, and the tools I’m actually using day to day.
What is social SEO?
If you’re new to the term, social SEO is the practice of optimising the content you post on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube so it’s found through search, not just through the feed or the algorithm’s recommendations. That means treating your captions, on-screen text, spoken audio, profile bio and video titles the way you’d treat a webpage: with real keywords, written for real people, structured so a platform’s search function can understand what you’re talking about.
It’s a slightly different skill to traditional SEO, and it sits somewhere between it and general social strategy, which is exactly why it confuses people. You’re not writing meta descriptions or building backlinks. You’re making sure that when someone types “how to…” into Instagram’s search bar or YouTube’s search box, your content has a fair chance of showing up.
What’s changed since my workshop
Google has since published its own guidance on how AI search fits into all this, confirming that the fundamentals haven’t gone anywhere. Strong SEO, genuinely useful content written for people rather than algorithms, still sits at the centre of how you get found, even inside AI Overviews.
AI Overviews themselves have leaned further into video too. A well-optimised YouTube video now has a real chance of surfacing there as well as in standard search, which means one piece of content can earn you visibility in two places at once.
There’s also a stat worth correcting while we’re here, because it gets repeated constantly. You’ll have seen the claim that 40% of Gen Z prefer TikTok or Instagram over Google. The original research behind that was narrower than the headline suggests. It referred to specific local discovery tasks, like finding somewhere for lunch, not search behaviour as a whole. It’s still a meaningful trend, but it’s worth using accurately rather than as a blanket statistic.
Why social SEO matters more than you think
SEO feels daunting to a lot of the people I work with. Not vaguely intimidating, but genuinely daunting, in the way that makes it easy to put off indefinitely. And the two formats that tend to trigger that feeling most are blogs and long-form YouTube content. Almost every client I speak to dreads them. There’s a full article’s worth of structure sitting in their head, a video that needs planning, filming and editing. It feels like a huge task before you’ve even started, and that’s often enough to stop it happening at all.
I don’t think the answer is to pretend that fear away. I think the answer is to give people a smaller first step that still counts, and that’s where social SEO earns its place. Not as a nice-to-have extra, but as a genuine bridge.
You’re already creating social content. That part isn’t new or scary, it’s already part of your routine. What changes is applying a bit of intentional keyword thinking to what you’re posting anyway: your captions, your on-screen text, your profile bio, the words you actually say out loud in a Reel or TikTok.
Do that consistently, and you build two things at once. You build search visibility you weren’t getting before, because platforms are reading and ranking that content the same way search engines rank a webpage. And you build a bank of material, tested language, proven hooks, topics that actually landed, that makes the leap into a blog post or a longer video feel far less like starting from a blank page.
Social SEO isn’t a replacement for long-form content. It’s the on-ramp to it. Small, low-pressure steps that get you moving in the right direction, so that when you’re ready for the bigger piece, you’re not starting cold.
The tools I’m using
vidIQ is my main tool for YouTube keyword research, and it’s been part of my process for a long time now. The bit worth flagging if you haven’t seen it: with the browser extension, there’s now an Instagram filter tab, which is genuinely useful if you’re working across both platforms and want that research pulled into one place.
Keyword Tool.io works from autocomplete data, so the suggestions it surfaces are phrases real people are actually typing, not guesses. It covers YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, which makes it handy when you’re planning content across more than one platform at once. It’s a good sense check for whether a phrase like “seo for social media” or “social media and seo” is actually being searched before you build content around it. The only downside, is that A LOT of it is blocked behind a paywall (boo) and the instagram feature still tries to prioritise hashtag search, rather than keywords.
Keywords Everywhere sits in your browser and shows real-time search volume as you’re typing, so you get a sense of demand without needing to leave the page you’re working on.
AnswerThePublic is brilliant for question-based content, the kind of phrasing that works whether you’re writing a caption, a video title or eventually a blog post. Typing in a seed term like “social seo” surfaces the actual questions people are asking, things like what social SEO actually means or how social media activity influences search rankings, rather than the topics you assume they care about. It’s a good habit to run your core topics through it before you plan a content batch, so you’re answering real questions instead of guessing.
Putting it into practice
A few habits worth building in, drawn from that original workshop and still holding true:
- Say your keyword out loud in the first few seconds of a video. Platforms transcribe spoken audio, and it counts.
- Put it in your on-screen text too, ideally early and clearly.
- Write your bio and profile name with a keyword in mind, not just your brand name.
- Use captions to lead with the keyword phrase, naturally, in a way a person would actually say it.
- Keep hashtags supporting, not leading. They categorise. Keywords get you found.
None of this needs to feel like a big production. Small, consistent tweaks to what you’re already making, applied with a bit more intention, is what social SEO actually looks like in practice.
Want more?
I’m running an updated version of the original workshop, Social SEO 2.0, later this summer (late July or early August, date to be confirmed). If this is a topic you want to go deeper on, join the waitlist and you’ll be the first to know when it opens.
