Having good Instagram fanbase is always good for a brand name. Good number of followers are also useful for personal profiles and people who do influence work over the platform. Today, we are going to learn few methods and techniques to market Instagram page or profiles. Being an SEO expert , I would like to share few methods and proven techniques to do SEO for your Instagram profiles and pages. These are tested techniques on different client and methods are based on real time case studies. It is going to be an interesting information for people who are looking to increase Instagram followers for free and want to make their Instagram viral.
Importance of Instagram for Companies
Instagram is an app which is widely common between users. It has huge user base on Android and iOS platform. Since it is available for mobile device only, it is very easy to use and creates an alternative audience for marketers to market their products. It is so huge that, there were more than one billion active users were available on Instagram. (Sources: Instagram Users Official)
Instagram is an easy to use app and it does not require any desktop or laptop to run your campaigns or post an update on platform. A user just requires a mobile device to handle everything on Instagram. You can simply click pictures, add description and use your hashtags.
Let’s move on to the Instagram SEO Tips which I have collected while working for different clients.
Profile Matters
Your profile matters a lot if you are willing to do SEO for your Instagram Page or Profile. Only the Instagram profile name and description are searchable. So you can understand the importance of profile name and profile description. You should consider your profile description as your resume to show everything you have. Use most of the keywords in bio and make your profile description relevant to your organization or your aim.
After the description, username would be the next important thing which can help you in Instagram SEO. We know that it’s more than one billion users on Instagram and it’s not easy to get the username which you want. It is a big challenge though, but I would suggest you to come up with a profile name which can represent your business or yourself.
Pro Tip: It is suggested to keep a keyword in profile username to represent your brand name or services at the same time. For example @TheSEOGuyIndia is my username for this blog. Although I have never applied any Instagram SEO tips on this profile. But you can see I have used my primary Keyword SEO in username and Location for location.
Use ALT Text on Images
As I have written earlier in Image SEO tips Alt Text is one of the most important SEO practice for Image SEO. Instagram also has this feature. This feature allows users to write captions for their photos. However, this feature was introduced to help users who are visually impaired. As soon as you ad ALT text on images, Instagram automatically pop up the added ALT text on images.
Understand the Instagram Analytics
Instagram analytics is one of the important tools to improve Instagram SEO. You should know about your page or profile audience in details so that you could design marketing strategies accordingly. You can grow your Instagram fanbase if you can build the right Instagram marketing strategies.
In recent times, social media platforms are turning into marketing platforms which can help you grow your business and generate leads as well. The number of smart phones is growing exponentially and use of social media is increasing. Average time spent on social media is way more than average time spent on searching product or services over search engines.
Since you can understand the importance of this platform, You should know all the Instagram SEO tips to perform better on Instagram as it is becoming a big social media platform with more than one billion users and millions of active users.
Instagram Hashtags
Hashtags are important for Instagram platform also for Instagram SEO. When a hashtag is added, your post is added to the directory of that hashtags. The “#” symbol is added to a word or the combination of words to attract the audiences to your post. When people hashtags on Instagram or click on hashtags they find your post in the list.
You could choose between multiple relevant hashtags for your Instagram posts. Either choose between auto suggested hashtags or create new according to trending stories and your product/service category.
Pro Tips: Use your services and product to create hashtags in first place. After that focus on relative trending or viral hashtags which could represent your post to a larger audience. Capitalization in words i.e. using first letter capital or defining combination of words with capitalization while converting it into a hashtag would be good.
For example #SearchEngineOptimization in this hashtag, you could see SEO every first letter of word in capital which makes it easy to understand.
Account Linking
Instagram has a feature to link your other social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. You should always take this advantage and promote your account thorough other social media channels.
While sharing your account on other platforms, you could receive direct visitors to your profile. It does not have a huge impact on SEO until you have massive number of clicks. But it is always good to generate profile views and gain new followers.
Add Call-To-Action Buttons
Adding a call to action button is a good practice to connect with users directly. Including call-to-action is also a great way to engage audiences in your posts. You can simply ask profile visitors to:
- Like your photos
- Tag their Friends
- Comment on pictures
There are a lot of users who like to see pictures only. You can use this feature as an additional tool to drive engagement as well.
Use Instagram Stories
Just like WhatsApp and facebook, Instagram allows it’s users to add stories for 24 hours. But Instagram stories has few advance features such as:
- Adding Stickers
- Creating Polls
- Tag Locations
- Use emojis
- Send to Button
- Questions and Answers
Every feature has its own value. If you use them wisely, you could drive better engagement on your Instagram profile. For example, you could use Q&A option to collect user feedback and suggestions. However, you can tag your location to attract local audience.
You could upload images and videos to create Instagram stories and use additional features in it.
Additional Instagram SEO Tips
So far, we have learnt about few good Instagram SEO Tips. Most of them are good enough to generate positive outcome. You can also consider following additional suggestions to focus on other aspects too, like:
- Create a posting calendar and to manage post schedule posts
- Maintain the post frequency to offer your followers more content.
- Play with hashtags and do your experiments with it.
- Learn to ask question on Instagram so that you could create direct engagement with users.
- Work hard on stories and come up with stunning stories.
- Learn to use fonts, emojis, and characters
- Online contests and prizes for product or services promotion
Hope these Instagram SEO Tips would help you to grow your Instagram page or profiles. Keep exploring TheSEOGuy for more Latest SEO Tips.
Instagram SEO – FAQs
Depending on your country, you could choose the posting time. There is no such guidelines for posting on Instagram but you could consider the timings when most users are online using the data available in Instagram analytics. Go to insights > Audience > See Followers (Choose hours). It is the timings when most of the followers have followed your account. Not an exact metrics but it can give you a broad Idea about posting timings.
Instagram is a social media platform not a search engine. Ranking concept is for search engines only. In Instagram you could get featured under different categories. For this you should use multiple set of keywords and convert them into hashtags. People who are following those hashtags could see your posts and might follow your profile.
Instagram reach rate is the number of people who have seen your post divided by the total number of your page or profile followers. As an industry-standard, an engagement rate on Instagram between 1% and 3% is generally good, and it is the average we see on an influencer’s profile. You could grow your page or profile if you are monitoring the reach rate regularly and working to increase it.
You can follow given basic practices of Instagram SEO:
- Profile Optimization
- Use of Alt Text
- Learn to use Instagram Analytics
- Create and Use Hashtags
- Add Call to Action Button
- Instagram Stories
- Account Linking These are few common Instagram SEO tips which are suggested for better outcome.
If you have additional suggestions for above written information, then do comment below. You can also share any sort of feedback or suggestion with me.
Looking for a Social Media Agency near you? Talk to our social media experts today.
Discover more from TheSEOGuy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.