It’s challenging to get Instagram profiles to show up in search results. The pictures on Instagram are blocked from being indexed by search engines, however the profiles can still be indexed. It’s a challenge, but it’s not insurmountable.
Instagram is a powerful visual tool for digital marketers to use. Anyone involved in a multichannel marketing strategy realises that marketing your Instagram profile should extend beyond the platform itself.
Instagram accounts, on the other hand, are pretty tough to index and display in search results.
This is because the majority of Instagram users aren’t interested in self-promotion, and Instagram actually prevents search engines from indexing your Instagram pictures. The photos are not searchable, but the profiles themselves are.
- Make sure to set your profile to public.
By default, Instagram accounts are set to public, allowing anybody to view your profile and all of your posts. This is obviously how you want it as a marketer. It’s a good idea to double-check that your privacy settings haven’t been changed and that this hasn’t been updated.
- Create an Instagram social profile schema.
You can inform Google which social media profiles are yours by using schema.org markup. Your social media profiles will appear in the Knowledge Graph if your brand is given a card.
- Include your most important keyword in your Instagram name
Your Instagram page’s title tag is produced automatically based on your profile information and looks like this:
My Name (@username) * Instagram photos and videos
Including your primary target keyword under your profile name is the only way to get your most important keyword into your Instagram title tags.
Keyword stuffing is strongly discouraged here, but there is a way to do it that is appropriate for your business and users. It’s as simple as altering « Casey’s » to « Casey’s Groceries, » for example.
To update your name in Instagram, click the profile button
Then just change the « Name » field by clicking the « Edit Profile » button.
- Include a specific and keyword-rich bio
While you’re editing your profile, double-check that your bio is optimized for search results.
You don’t have much area to work with: Instagram bios are limited to 150 characters, which is identical to Google’s dynamic meta description limit.
Thankfully, if you’re utilising hashtag keywords and the keywords are appropriate, « keyword stuffing » is more or less permitted in an Instagram bio. Instagram hashtags are clickable links that transport users to a list of posts that share the same hashtag, making them useful to users.
You can also insert @ usernames, if you work with other brands or influencers, and these will turn into clickable links.
The bio is the only text on your page that renders as html and can be crawled by search engines, therefore it accounts for a significant portion of the SEO.
To choose which keywords to include here, utilize a combination of TagBlender for Instagram hashtag research and the Google Keyword Planner for keyword research.
However, it’s a good idea to include at least a few phrases in your bio that aren’t hashtags to offer the search engines more semantic material to chew on. Given the restricted area, fill out your bio as much as possible. Make it clear who you are and what you’re about as much as possible.
Of course, when you’re editing your profile, double-check that the « Website » column has the URL for your company’s website.
- Treat your image caption like a title tag — because it is one
We often approach Instagram image captions like meta descriptions, however they should be treated more like title tags, because the caption is included in the title tag when Instagram produces a page for your post.
My Name on Instagram: “this is my image caption”
So, despite the fact that your @ username does not appear here, we can see how essential the « Name » section in your profile is. However, your image caption takes up the rest of the title tag.
When emojis are included, the issue becomes significantly worse.
I don’t recommend keeping the image caption short enough to fit within the title tag because it would be a very short image caption.
However, it’s a good idea to check where your title tag will cut off on a frequent basis and make sure the most crucial information is at the start of the caption, before the title tag cuts off.
Make sure your caption is focused and keyword-rich, just like your bio, but bear in mind that it will also serve as a call to action from the search results. A series of hashtags may make sense and look fine on Instagram, but it will appear terrible in a title tag in the search results.
- Link directly to your Instagram posts
This is, without a doubt, the most crucial step in the procedure.
Because the Instagram web app is primarily written in JavaScript, Google doesn’t consider the links to your individual Instagram posts from your Instagram profile to be « actual » links. As a result, the vast majority of Instagram postings do not appear in search results.
You cannot promote your individual Instagram posts merely by promoting your Instagram profile. You’ll need to link to these posts directly from your other channels, making sure to copy the link that leads directly to the post, in order for anyone to find them in the search results.
To guarantee that your content is indexed, you should naturally include a link to it from as many of your platforms as feasible, within reason.
This can be done by writing Instagram recap blog posts or inserting citation links to your Instagram postings every time you publish an Instagram photo to your blog.
Conclusion
While Instagram is not an SEO-friendly platform, adopting these extra steps will help your Instagram profile and posts appear in search results when similar businesses are likely to be overlooked. To increase the visibility of your Instagram profile, we recommend including these procedures into your workflow.
