You thought you were done with SEO when you built your website? Think again! Instagram algorithms prioritize content that puts you in front of your target market. But in order to get picked by Instagram as a top content creator, a thought leader in your profession, you should use winning SEO strategies to boost your Insta-presence. Here’s how:
Change your username
The first way you can start to optimize your account for SEO, is by ensuring your username reflects the important keywords of your brand. This may be easier said than done for established Insta accounts, but new accounts definitely benefit from this tweak.
In some cases, it doesn’t make sense to have a keyword you’d like to rank for in your name, and in those cases, you can implement the rest of the advice on this page instead.
Update your name field
In addition to ensuring you have the best handle to match your keywords and the search intent of your customers, you also want to optimize your name field. This is even more important if you can’t optimize your username for reasons already mentioned.
Using the most important keywords to your customers in your name field is one way to get noticed by Insta’s algorithm. For example, instead of my name showing as Kristina Maness, on IG it says “Tampa Branding Photographer”.
Optimize your bio
You can rank for additional keyword sets and phrases by including them in your bio. Your Instagram profile has few places where you can write freely, and your bio is one of them. Using that space to kick up a few keywords is not only smart, but a really important thing to do for your brand.
Use hashtags
Hashtags are like keywords on Instagram and you can use them in much them same way. By including hashtags in all of your posts, you not only ensure that you get in front of people reading the hashtags, you also trigger IG’s algorithm to recognize the most important components of your brand.
The scheduling tool, Planoly, allows you to schedule first comments on every post. So if you don’t want to look spammy, you can schedule your post in advance and ensure your hashtags show up in the comments.
Plan your captions
Long or short, captions are important. Even a short caption can make a big impact if you craft it perfectly. But Instagram’s algorithm likes wordier explanations and solid descriptions that help the reader understand what they are looking at and why its meaningful. Luckily, the longer your description the better chance you have to use important keywords that will help people find your brand.If you follow these SEO standards for Instagram, your page will get maximum exposure on the platform that boosts people who understand it’s algorithm. And if you liked this content, why don’t you navigate to your Insta account and give me a follow @kristinamaness.