Time-frequency methods, which allow us to observe the seismic signal in time and frequency domains simultaneously, can efficiently discern the seismic response features of geological bodies in different frequency bands. In this paper, a newly developed time-frequency method named second order multi-synchrosqueezing transform (SMSST) is introduced to analyze seismic data. SMSST combines the second-order instantaneous frequency estimation and the iterative idea of multi-synchrosqueezing transform to approximate the true instantaneous frequency trajectory. It solves the problems of non-reassignment points and the sensitivity to noise at the same time. Synthetic example is employed to validate the superiority of SMSST in time-frequency analysis. Results obtained from four different methods show that SMSST offer the best performance in terms of energy-concentration and noise robustness. Applications on field data further demonstrate that SMSST-based method is suitable and effective to highlight geological information and stratigraphic features compared to the previous techniques. The capabilities of SMSST for accurate reservoir localization with high resolution, making it a promising and potential tool in seismic interpretation.