I looked up what people actually search for — and it changed how I think about content

For the first couple of months of posting, I made content based almost entirely on what I felt like talking about. Which sounds like a reasonable creative approach, and in some ways it is — I wasn't making things I didn't care about, and I think that energy carries. But it also meant I was operating in something of a fog. I was posting and the posts were going out and sometimes they found people and sometimes they didn't, and I had no real model for understanding why. I was throwing things into the air and watching some of them land and some of them not, and calling the outcome "engagement" as if I understood the mechanism.

I didn't understand the mechanism. I was guessing.

And then one afternoon in late August, I stumbled across creator search insight — TikTok's Creator Search Insights tool — and the fog lifted a bit. Not entirely. But enough to see a little further than I had been seeing.

What Creator Search Insights actually is

I found it by accident, through a comment someone left on a video I'd posted about my morning routine. They mentioned it in passing — something like "have you checked CSI, it would probably tell you a lot about this niche" — and I had no idea what they were referring to but I wrote it down in my paper journal and looked it up that evening.

Creator Search Insights is a TikTok tool that shows you what people are actually typing into the search bar — not what's trending on the explore page, but what specific phrases and questions real people are actively searching for. The distinction matters. Trending content is what the algorithm is currently amplifying. Search content is what people go looking for on purpose. These are very different signals, and they correspond to very different kinds of content.

What I saw when I opened it, for the first time, sitting at my desk as the August evening went pale and golden outside the window — I had that specific feeling of a curtain being pulled back. Here were actual human beings, typing actual things, and those things were a map of what they needed. Not what they'd passively watched. What they'd gone looking for.

The search terms that surprised me

I expected the big-category things. Morning routine. Self-care. Anxiety tips. These were all there, in their expected positions, with their expected search volumes. I was unsurprised and not particularly illuminated.

What surprised me was the specificity of the middle-tier searches. Not just "morning routine" but things like "morning routine when you have no motivation" and "how to have a morning routine when you hate mornings." Not just "self-care" but "self-care for people who feel guilty about it" and "self-care when you're tired all the time." These weren't broad aspirational searches — they were very specific, slightly desperate, human questions from people who were sitting somewhere feeling something particular and reaching for a phrase to describe it.

And I looked at that list and thought: I know these people. I have been these people. I was one of these people a year ago, typing something very similar into various corners of the internet hoping someone had made the thing I was looking for.

The gap between what I'd assumed people wanted — polished aspirational content about beautiful mornings and perfect routines — and what they were actually searching for — honest, specific content about the mornings that aren't beautiful and the routines that fall apart — was instructive. Humbling, even. I'd been making the first kind and underselling my capacity to make the second.

How I used it without losing my voice

This is the part I was most careful about, because there's a version of this tool that would make you a very efficient content robot — cranking out videos optimised for search terms, hitting the right keywords, covering the right topics in the right order. I could see how you'd slide into that. I could feel the pull of it, honestly. You see the numbers, you see the gap, and there's a version of you that wants to just fill the gaps as efficiently as possible.

But I think that version loses something that's harder to measure than search volume. It loses the specific quality of someone talking about their actual life from their actual experience, which is — in my honest belief — why anyone watches creators in the first place. Not for the information, exactly. For the sense that someone is being real with you. That they know something because they've lived it, not because they researched the keyword.

So the approach I've tried to take is: use the search data to find where the conversation is happening, then bring my own voice to that conversation. Not to manufacture content that hits the search term. To notice that many people are searching for "how to stay consistent when you feel like giving up" and then write honestly about the specific Wednesday when I wanted to give up and what I actually did and what actually helped. The search term is the map. The experience is the content.

The moment something clicked

It was a Thursday evening in late August — warm still, but with the first suggestion of something cooler coming, the way August sometimes gives you a preview of September a week early. I was at my desk, the laptop open, a glass of water sweating gently on a coaster, the window cracked. The street below was quiet except for someone's music two floors down, something low and unhurried that suited the mood exactly.

I'd been looking at the search data for about an hour, making notes in the paper journal, drawing little connection lines between topics that seemed related. And something clicked — not dramatically, not an epiphany. More like a gear engaging. I could see the shape of the next month. Not as a content calendar full of optimised titles, but as a genuine arc: topics I actually cared about, in a sequence that made sense emotionally, in language that people were already using when they described what they were looking for.

It felt less like strategy and more like translation. The data was telling me what people needed. My job was to write the version of that thing that was actually true to my experience. That felt doable. That felt, for the first time in a few weeks of vague creative malaise, exciting.

Keeping the balance

I'm still figuring this out. I have not solved the "searchable but authentic" equation — I don't think there is a final solution, only an ongoing calibration. Some weeks I lean more toward what the data suggests. Some weeks I make something entirely because it's on my mind and I need to say it and I trust that whoever needs it will find it. Both feel necessary. Both feel like parts of a whole.

Data is just information about what people are reaching for. You still get to decide whether what you make is worth their reach.

The tool is useful. It's a flashlight rather than a map, I think — it shows you what's immediately in front of you but doesn't do the navigating for you. The navigating is still yours. The voice is still yours. The thing that will make someone watch to the end and come back for more is still, in my experience, the feeling that a real person made this for a real reason and genuinely meant it.

• Use search data to find where people are already having the conversation you want to join.
• Don't optimise at the expense of the voice — the voice is the point.
• The most powerful combination is a relatable topic delivered from personal truth.

I'll keep updating my thinking on this as it evolves — this is still early-days stuff for me, a few months into a diary that I started without entirely knowing where it was going. The fog hasn't completely lifted. But I know a bit more about where I'm walking, which is honestly all you can ask for at any given point in the journey.

Something I've been sitting with since that desk-at-dusk evening is the question of what creation is actually for. I've thought about it in terms of views, which is probably the least helpful frame but the most available one when you're starting out and the numbers are the most visible form of feedback. I've thought about it in terms of connection, which is more interesting and harder to measure. I've thought about it in terms of the craft itself, which is the version I want to keep coming back to: am I making something that I'm proud of, something that is honest and specific and genuinely mine, regardless of how it performs?

The creator search insight tool doesn't answer that question. It can tell me what people are looking for. It can't tell me whether what I make is worth finding. That judgment is mine, and it requires a different kind of attention — the quiet, slightly uncomfortable kind where you read back something you made and ask: does this sound like a person or does this sound like content? Is there a voice here or is there a strategy? Both can produce similar outputs. Only one of them feels sustainable over the long run.

A few months into this soft little diary, I'm still learning the difference. Still calibrating. Still sitting at the desk in the late August evening with the laptop open and a glass of something cold beside it, making notes about what I want to say and how I want to say it, trying to stay on the right side of the line between useful and authentic. Most days I think I'm managing it. Some days I'm not sure. Both feel like part of the process, and I'd rather keep going than wait until I've worked it all out. 🤍