Big news for creators, brands, and marketers: your Instagram content is now officially discoverable on search engines.
You heard right: Instagram is leaning into Social search engine optimisation meaning your content caption, copy and creative will be indexed by the likes of Google, Bing, Chat GPT and other search engines.
So, what’s changed? Instagram will now allow search engines to index individual posts from public Creator and Professional accounts. Basically, this means your Reels and static image posts can now show up in Google searches and therefore compete with traditional websites in organic search rankings.
While the concept of this isn’t exactly new (TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube have been doing this for years), Instagram has finally decided to join the party – and with 2 billion+ worldwide monthly active users and 500 million+ daily active users*, it’s about to make a huge shift in the world of online marketing.
If you’re still asking why you should care about this, imagine everything you post on your brand’s Instagram now being searchable outside of the platform.
More eyes, more impressions, more brand awareness and more opportunities to connect with new audiences.
How to boost your Social SEO?
The good news is, it’s pretty easy – and there is a range of things you can implement today to start taking up precious online real estate.
- Do your keyword research: Utilise tools such as TikTok Creator Insights, Google Trends and AlsoAsked to see what’s trending and how to leverage these insights.
- Sprinkle them around: Once you’ve learnt the phrases and buzzwords your audience are using, ensure you’re including them in your captions, your text overlays on Reels/Carousel slides and your Instagram bio. A quick win could even be doing a high-level audit of your recent posts to see where you can edit the captions to include a couple of keywords.
Instagram just gave us all more of an online stage, and you’ll be at a disadvantage if you’re not taking it. Start searching those keywords and make your content S(E)O good.
*Source: BusinessOfApps, Statista, Data Reportal.
