Instagram SEO, How to Qualify and Convert Your Customers

At Part Three Digital, social media and search marketing are our focus areas and what we do best. It is no shock that the social media landscape is dynamically changing and is becoming an increasingly hard nut to crack, due to its constantly wavering audiences, algorithms, platforms, and content. It is essential, now more than ever, to use social media marketing and SEO together to maximise brand performance to help brand's reach their overall commercial goals.

We can help you achieve this; fancy knowing more about what we can offer? Take a look at the digital marketing services we offer.

Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri detailed in a recent blog post that the Instagram algorithm is changing, and he sheds new light on how Instagram ranking actually works. We chat about some key takeaways from his blog post in our reel, but if you don’t fancy the journey I will briefly outline what he said. Mosseri highlights that this new ranking process is about personalising experiences for Instagram users by showing them a balance of content from accounts they know, love and follow, and content from accounts that users don’t follow, but might be interested in. 

This is great news for brands, as now there is an opportunity for brand accounts to reach new audiences and increase discoverability. But how do you do this? We’ve got the answer, Instagram SEO.

As we have identified social media as an ever-evolving space and fundamental to keep up to date with the latest ways to maximise your brand's accounts for Instagram SEO. Instagram SEO is now an essential part of supporting any strategy by presenting an abundance of opportunities for brands to reach maximum visibility so that your target audiences can see your content and engage with your brand.

With consistency and strategic execution, you can use Instagram SEO as a powerful and supportive tool in your digital marketing arsenal, which will ultimately aid in driving brand growth and success.

What is Instagram SEO?

So, when a user on Instagram searches for something that relates to your brand, you will want your account or content to appear near the top of the list, but how do you do that?

Think of Instagram as its own independent search engine, like a unique, mini-Google. On Instagram, you can tailor and optimise your content so that it is seen by as many people as possible – from users searching for specific keywords, hashtags, or content - to it being suggested to them on their feeds.

So, what is all the fuss about? Instagram SEO helps with brand discoverability, and, by your content reaching more audiences, you will have a greater chance at growing your following, communities and greater brand awareness, which will aid in achieving overall commercial goals.

To maximise your brand’s visibility and discoverability with Instagram SEO, you will need to optimise your content to ensure that it will rank higher in Instagram’s search results and suggested content.

But what about the algorithm?! Yes, even though Instagram does have an automatic algorithmic process, there are a variety of ways in which you can use Instagram SEO to support, guide and control it in a more optimised direction.

That’s what we are here for, and our tips below will help you get there!

1.) How to optimise your Instagram profile 101

Optimising your profile is essential for increasing your brand account discoverability and visibility on the platform, as it provides users and the app, context for the purpose of your account by highlighting who you are and what you are about.

Similarly, to Google, Instagram delivers the most relevant profiles depending on the term searched, so it is necessary for your profile to be optimised to aid in its search ranking.

Optimising your profile consists of adding relevant keywords to your name, bio, captions, and comments that clearly describe your brand; using words and terms that users will search for when trying to find accounts like yours.

Our own Instagram account highlights how to optimise a profile well (if we do say so ourselves!).

We have strategically incorporated our primary keywords into our name and username. We are a digital marketing agency that specialises in social and search, and this is exactly what we have highlighted here. Having such keywords in our name allows for our account to show high in search ranking when a non-following user searches for ‘digital’.

Your Instagram bio is a great way to organically integrate keywords into your profile. We have outlined ‘digital’ as our primary keyword and our secondary keywords as ‘social media’, ‘search’ and ‘marketing’ and all of these we incorporate throughout our content in hashtags and copy.

When you have identified some keywords that are a brand fit, you will need to pinpoint your primary keyword and consistently use it across your profile in your bio, account name and content captions.

Why do you need to do this? Using relevant, descriptive keywords on your profile means that your profile is more likely to appear on Instagram’s Explore page, resulting in more people seeing your profile and content.

A note from us: when using keywords, avoid keyword stuffing to ensure that your content is authentic and appealing to your target audiences.

2.) Hashtags and keywords

Hashtags and keywords exist to allow new content to be discovered and using the right hashtags can put your content directly in front of your target audiences. They are a great way to increase the discoverability of your content.

To find relevant keywords and hashtags for your brand, we recommend researching popular hashtags related to your business across a variety of different platforms, such as; TikTok, Google Search, Trends, Answer the Public and occasionally Moz.

You can use these platforms to truly develop an understanding of what your audiences are searching for across both social and search and become aware of what their behaviours and motivations are and what really resonates.

By developing an understanding of your brand’s audience, you will be able to connect with them authentically, which will, in turn, aid in community growth and add value to your brand.

Similarly to keywords, once you have established what your audience wants and have established a bank of niche and broad hashtags that will resonate with them, use these keywords and hashtags consistently throughout your content; in your bio, post copy and in reel text overlays.

However, ensure you are only using 3-5 hashtags with a combination of niche and broad to hit that sweet spot of niche community lovers and those who have more generic interests that still relate to your brand.

Hashtag monitoring is super important when it comes to the strategic use of hashtags for SEO as you will need to consistently monitor the success of the hashtags that you are using and how they are impacting your account, content and how they resonate with your audience.

TAKE NOTE: even though this is a commonly used tactic to maintain post aesthetic, hiding hashtags in your comments will negatively impact search results. To ensure that your content influences search results, keep your hashtags directly in your captions!

3.) Hot topics

In addition to keywords and hashtags, Instagram has a secret gem; Topics. Topics can be used when uploading reels; the topics feature allows you to select up to 3 key topics that relate to your brand and reach audiences who share similar interests to your brand.

Topics allow the algorithm to learn more about the content that your brand is posting and help match your Reel with viewers.

Topics are separated into key divisions, from fashion and beauty to business and education. Then each division continues into additional sub-categories: Food and drink alcoholic beverages, meat, breads, seafood, and sports; home workouts and fitness activities, gym workouts, and strength training.

Topics are a great way to give your content that extra little boost of context to aid the algorithm without having to think too much about it!

4.) The art of alt-text

Alt-text is an incredibly effective way to help increase accessibility and enhance user experience.

Instagram alt-text is a brief description, outlining what is depicted in an Instagram image; typically, alt-text is used for describing pieces of content whenever they fail to load or are read by screen readers.

Alt-text will help Instagram SEO understand the context of your content. When optimising your content with alt-text it can help improve your ranking on the Instagram search feature and overall discoverability.

To add alt-text to your content, you will find it in the advanced settings, you will find a ‘Write Alt Text’ option, here is where you can begin to detail the content you are posting.

A note from us: when writing alt-text, it is essential to keep it concise, descriptive, and relevant to the content. As we previously outlined, avoid keyword stuffing or using vague descriptions; focus on providing meaningful descriptions of the visual content.

5.) Create content that connects

You can use SEO to inform your brand’s content and you can leverage this to create content that truly resonates with your brand’s audience on Instagram. To create truly meaningful connections with your target audiences and community, it is not enough to just, react to trends and post aesthetic content that looks good.

You can use other platforms to inform your research and to develop an understanding of what your audiences truly want from brands. When conducting thorough research within your niche, keep an eye out for the real questions, that real people are asking and create content that answers them. This information will allow you to fine-tune your content strategy to create authentic content that truly connects.

Our client OUTCIDER is a great example of this, as we know that the OUTCIDER audience will not be actively searching for cider, so it was our goal to ensure that OUTCIDER is present in as many audience touchpoints as possible.

We did this by maximising Instagram as a platform, tapping into different platforms like Spotify where we created OUTCIDER playlists for different consumption moments and strategically partnering with Instagram influencers who authentically embodied the core values of OUTCIDER to solidify OUTCIDER’s connection with their audience on Instagram.

By understanding audience behaviours and preferences, you will be able to gain valuable insights into what resonates with your audience. Use these findings to your advantage by creating engaging and authentic content that creates brand awareness, and brand trust and encourages community building.

Understanding absolutely what your audience wants and needs are, demonstrates that your brand is listening to its community. This is essential for brands to maintain this as it illustrates that they truly care about their community. In doing so, having these relationships with your brand’s community will foster strong brand loyalty and will aid in overall commercial goals.

We recognise the challenges of navigating this evolving landscape. Our specialisation in fusing social media marketing and SEO can help you maximise your brand’s performance and aid in achieving commercial goals.

With the constantly evolving changes coming from each platform, there are so many exciting opportunities for brands to reach new audiences and increase discoverability and our expertise in these fields can help you make a difference.

Remember; to optimise your profile, use relevant keywords and hashtags, leverage alt text and create meaningful content that connects with your key audiences.

Get in touch with us to learn more about what we can offer and how we can help you reach new audiences and leverage Instagram SEO to maximise your brand’s performance.