4 Instagram SEO Tips that Grow Your Audience
Growing your brand on social platforms such as Instagram takes a two-pronged approach when it comes to your audience. The first is growing your audience by increasing brand awareness; the second is to nurture your existing audience by building loyalty and trust.
Today we are going to take a look at how to increase brand awareness on Instagram by optimizing and increasing your discoverability.
What is Discoverability?
Discoverability is how easily your account can be found on a platform in a search. We often think of search engines and social media as separate types of online platforms, and that is essentially true. However, each social media platform has the option to search the platform for accounts, tags, and keywords, meaning discoverability on each social platform is just as important as discoverability on Google for increasing brand awareness.
When your brand is more discoverable on a platform, that means your account or posts are pushed out to a wider audience. This new audience is able to discover your brand, interact with your posts, and follow you. In essence, higher discoverability means increased brand awareness and audience growth. And when your audience grows, that helps push your account out to even more people, and offers you a wider target audience to nurture into warm leads.
How to Increase Your Instagram Discoverability
This all sounds amazing, right? But you may be wondering just how you increase your discoverability on Instagram. The key is through improving your Instagram SEO (search engine optimization).
By now you are probably familiar with SEO for Google and how keywords and key phrases are important. Instagram SEO works in much the same way. It’s about tailoring your content with those keywords so that it appears in as many places as possible on the platform from search results to the Explore Page. The more places you can get your content in, the greater your chances are of growing your following and building an engaged Instagram community.
Now, let’s look at some tactics that get more eyes on your Instagram content.
1 | Add Keywords to Your Profile
Let’s start by refreshing your Instagram profile. Every place you have the ability to put text on the platform is a place you want to take advantage of by including key words or phrases. Ideally, you want to incorporate keywords into your name and/or username. However, if that is impossible (let’s face it, you want your name to be your business name too), then make sure you add those into your bio. It’s important to select the right category for your profile as well, which can help inform the platform what your profile is all about. You can access all of these settings by going to your Instagram profile then tapping the “edit profile” button.
2 | Write Descriptive Captions
Now that your profile is updated, let’s move on to your Reel and photo captions. This tells the platform what a specific post is about. Not only can you search hashtags on Instagram, but you can also search usernames, locations, and keywords. The more descriptive your captions are, the better for keyword searches on the platform. The best descriptive captions use relevant keywords, so don’t be tempted to include keywords or phrases that don’t apply to your post.
3 | Include Relevant Hashtags
So you’ve added keywords to your caption, but let’s discuss hashtags. Just like keywords in your captions, you want to use relevant hashtags in your post as well. Hashtags are used by the platform to categorize your content so it gets put in front of the right audience. Don’t add a trending hashtag if it doesn’t apply to your post; this will turn new audiences off and lead to distrust. What’s the magic number of hashtags? Glad you asked! We’ve covered that very topic previously, so make sure you check out our post on Instagram hashtag best practices.
4 | Add Descriptive Alt Text to Your Posts
This final piece is often forgotten about, but is just as important. First of all, alt text makes your posts more accessible for those with vision impairments, but it can also be a good way to include more SEO. Make sure you are putting accessibility at the forefront, so don’t just list off keywords for the sake of getting them in. Much like your caption, your alt text should describe your image while also using keywords naturally within it. You can access alt text by tapping on the Advanced Settings when creating a post.
Final Thoughts
With a few tweaks you can easily improve your Instagram SEO so that your discoverability is increased. By increasing discoverability, you can improve brand awareness and grow your audience. Then it’s up to you to continue to nurture that audience and grow a community around your brand on the platform!
Need assistance with your Instagram strategy? Tintero Creative can help you break through the digital noise and get your brand noticed! We work closely with clients to create social media strategies that tell your brand story while also meeting best practices that help you succeed online. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more!