Improve Your SEO On Instagram

Getting organic reach on Instagram is getting harder and harder.

What do I mean with organic reach?

It is the number of people who have seen your content on a social media platform through unpaid distribution. No boosted or sponsored posts. ➡️ There's no payment involved.

There are millions of users on the Gram fighting for attention.

And the algorithm only shows your content to a small % of users. So making your account and posts stand out is becoming more challenging. That's a fact. While the exact % is not known, rumor has it that Instagram only shows your content to 10% of your followers.

If that post provides value and gets a lot of engagement, it will get boosted and will be shown to a higher % of your audience, and so on. And if you're lucky, it might show up in the top 9 posts of a certain hashtag or the explore feed which means you'll get a massive amount of organic reach.

However, high-quality posts are not the only way for people to discover your account. Instagram works like a search engine. And you want to start taking advantage of that.

How do search engines work? They use keywords.

 So you want to use as many keywords as possible throughout your entire account. You basically want to rank on page 1 of Google because nobody looks at page 2. The goal is that your account shows up whenever people type "jewellery store" or in my case "graphic designer" or "social media manager" in the Instagram search bar. Whatever your business is, you want to be one of the accounts that show up in the top results.

How do you search engine optimize your Instagram account?

1. Make sure your account is public (not private)

2. Use keywords in your:

⚡️Name - Don’t just put your name here. Add extra keywords relevant to your business. In the example (below) of Chris Do, he added “IG Business Marketing”

⚡️ Bio - This is a great place to put your own branded hashtag and encourage people to use it in their posts. In Chris’ case, he wrote included his #1bminusone hashtag.

⚡️Captions (or comments) - This is an aesthetic choice. Hashtags both work if you put them in the caption or the comment section.

⚡️Alt-text - Don't use hashtags here. Describe the photo as you would to a friend. Do use relevant words in your description. You can add alt-text before uploading a post (via the “advanced options”). Or add it afterwards by going to your post, clicking on the 3 dots in the right corner and selecting “edit”.

Also, make sure you research the keywords you’re using. I always recommend to not use any hashtags with more than >1 million uses. The more people that use the hashtag, the harder it will be to stand out. Some hashtags are also banned by Instagram so watch out for those. A few examples of these tags are #elevator, #desk, #kickoff or #thought. Don't ask me why.

 You can use this tool to check if your account uses any banned hashtags.