What Is Seed Merit And How Do You Get It?

You’re probably here because you had a tiktok video, blog article or any sort of social media post, suddenly go viral several weeks or months after you posted it. This is likely due to Seed Merit. 

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Seed merit definition

Seed Merit refers to a powerful, sudden and long lasting period of high traffic your content may get on social media platforms, if you posted about a certain topic well before the topic started trending - usually before or during its polar trend stage. 

It's the advantage creators gain by making content about a topic early, before it becomes widely popular. When that topic later blows up, platforms like TikTok and other social media algorithms have a tendancy to surface the older, original posts on the topic.

Thanks to seed merit, you can compete with social media accounts that are 10x larger than yours, and even outperform them. Even if they post a video on the exact same topic, your content can still outperform theirs. Social media algorithms may prioritize your video over theirs, showing it to a wider audience and helping you generate more views than much larger creators.

Contrary to popular belief, Seed Merit isn’t actually hard coded into social media algorithms, but rather it is a natural growth effect caused by other positive signals such as viewer retention.

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For example….. 

Let’s say you wrote a blog article about 3D printing back in the early 2010s, long before 3D printing became a big trend.

At that time, almost nobody else was talking about it. There were very few competing articles. Because of this, people who were searching for 3D printing on google ended up clicking on your article more than anyone else’s, simply because there weren’t many options.

This means your article slowly built up a bunch of positive signals without much competition, such as:

• High CTR (Click-Through Rate): lots of people clicked your article when they saw it
  
  
• Good retention: people stayed on the page and actually read it
  
  
• Strong engagement: maybe they scrolled, shared it, or returned later
  
  
• Good dwell time: they didn’t immediately click back
  
  
• Low bounce rate: they didn’t instantly leave
  
  

These positive signals tell Google’s algorithm:
“People like this page. It answers their question well.”

Now fast forward a few years……

3D printing suddenly becomes extremely popular. Millions of people are now searching for it.

Huge websites, news sites, tech magazines, big brands etc…. All start publishing their own articles about 3D printing. They have more authority, more backlinks, more money, better writers… everything.

But here’s the where Seed Merit comes in…..
Your article stays at #1 on Google, even above these huge websites.

Why?

Because when the trend exploded, your article already had years of strong positive signals built up. Google sees that your page has a proven track record of satisfying readers. That history is extremely powerful and very hard for new articles to beat.

Newer competitors may have authority, but they do not have:

• your years of high CTR
  
  
• your years of good retention
  
  
• your years of positive user behaviour data
  
  

Google trusts the existing pattern more than a new guess.

So when the trend hits, Google basically says:

“This article has been performing well for a long time, and users clearly like it. Until someone consistently performs better, this stays #1.”

That’s why being early gives you a massive advantage.

You’re not #1 because Google gives you some magic “early bonus.”
You’re #1 because you already gathered the positive signals before the competition even showed up.

And that’s Seed Merit. 

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How does Seed Merit apply to other social media platforms? 

Now you might be thinking, well doesn’t this only apply to google and tiktok?

Wrong! 

Given that all social media algorithms work relatively similar to one another, the same principle applies to virtually every platform.

The theory is simple: Create content early about a particular topic = beat the competition in the long run. 

Businesses use the concept of Seed Merit to build companies and not have to spend money on marketing

Influencers and social media content creators use seed merit to grow their pages easily

Anyone can use Seed Merit to their advantage. The only hard part is discovering polar trends, which is why we offer a polar trend finding service.