When it comes to Instagram, understanding your Instagram SEO can help you multiply your engagement, visibility, and reach. 

There are about 1 billion monthly Instagram active users, making it the 6th largest social network worldwide. Though the majority of these users are businesses, that notwithstanding, you can leverage that to get a good engagement.

Apart from Facebook and Youtube, Instagram is more popular than Twitter and LinkedIn. Considering these factors, it’s very important to be on this social network to get new opportunities and new clients. 

So, how can one reach new users and create opportunities to interact with your brand?.

Yes, your answer is as good as mine, it’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization for Instagram) 

Having your content show up on Instagram search results can help you reach a wider audience who would be interested in your product or services organically. As a brand/business owner, Instagram SEO is very crucial to your business if you want to increase your engagement and make sales.

You might be wondering, what’s Instagram SEO?

Instagram SEO is the optimization of your Instagram account/ content to be found in search. It helps your profile to rank higher in search when someone searches for relevant keywords or hashtags, you want your content to appear on top.

Because Instagram users may now search by interests, you’ll have more possibilities, allowing you to go deeper and investigate keywords that are related to what you offer without being constrained by hashtags.

Because, like Google, Instagram users may search for certain topics or interests.

How can you create Instagram content that is optimized for people that are looking for content based on their interests?

The answer is straightforward: cultivate a sense of community and establish solid, long-term relationships.

Yes, the first step is to form a targeted community with whom you can connect regularly.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to appear as an authoritative brand on Instagram if you don’t develop that “community component.”

Let’s take a look at how you may do it on Instagram.

To begin with, Instagram is appropriate for a wide range of sectors…

Regardless of your industry, you can at least share the aspects of your business that your clients aren’t used to seeing:

Your daily experiences at work, behind-the-scenes photos of your offices, employee photos… all of these posts help to personify your brand. As a result, your organization and your proposition become more accessible right away.

But there’s is even a faster way and that’s the Seo for Instagram.

Some SEO strategies to increase your visibility

1. Optimize your Instagram profile:  to generate traffic to your profile, your profile must be optimized in terms of SEO. When people search for a particular keyboard or hashtag, Instagram just like google go through millions of account to bring out results relevant to the keyword being searched for.  The best place to include these keywords is on your profile otherwise known as your bio.  Also, your SEO journey on Instagram begins with your handle, choose a username relevant to what you offer.  For example, when I search for digital marketing and digital skills, I discover that all the accounts that popped had keywords in them.

2. Use secondary keywords in your bio: 

These are phrases related to the main keywords in case you are wondering what secondary keywords are. For example, if you are into cooking and meal preparation. Secondary keywords can be recipes, kitchen utensils, etc. You have the discretion on how to optimize your secondary keyword but don’t overuse it.

3. Use related keywords in your captions/publications: 

Now that you have worked on your bio, the next step is to optimize what you write for each post. Writing a meaningful and interesting caption will help you get more people to see your post on Instagram, especially on the Explore page.

This is because the Instagram explore page algorithm learns from users’ actions on the app, such as which accounts they follow and whose posts they like or comment on, to determine what content they are interested in.  If you express an interest in “Marketing,” for example, Instagram may respond by delivering content from accounts that frequently post about marketing.

What criteria does Instagram use to determine which accounts are eligible to post on Marketing?

Machine learning is used to detect accounts with similar content.

This means that Instagram looks at keywords on accounts to see how relevant they are to one another, and although some of those keywords come from an account’s name, username, and profile, others come from your post caption.

When you use informative captions for your business, Instagram will notice and group you with accounts that are similar to yours.

You may improve your Instagram captions by employing relevant, descriptive keywords. Also don’t overcrowd your post with many hashtags, 3-4 hashtags should be okay.

4. Use alt text to your images:

On Instagram, the alt text is the same as it is on the web.

It’s a new Instagram feature that lets you describe an image or video.

It allows you to add a thorough description to your photos or videos by writing unique replacement text.

This function was created for visually impaired Instagram users, however, it can also be used for SEO.

Instagram develops an automatic alternative so that they can listen to photo descriptions using a screen reader.

As customers navigate through the app, the alt text employs object recognition technology to provide an automatic description of each photo. If you leave the image alt text blank, Instagram will fill it in automatically. That’s why, so it’s best to fill it in yourself to make sure the caption matches what’s actually in the photo.

To fill in the alternative text, just before sharing your photo, click on “Advanced settings” at the bottom of the screen.

Next, select the “write your alt text” option.

Write the perfect description, then share your post as usual.

Alt text on Instagram provides the same benefits as alt text on images on your website.

Finally

Avoid buying followers, likes stealing content, etc. Instagram just like google has a way of punishing offenders in this aspect. So make sure you read and follow all the Instagram guidelines and avoid being shadowbanned. Like Google SEO, Instagram SEO takes time before you start seeing the result. Be consistent in your posts, use relevant keywords and hashtags.