Yes! Social media accounts do help with SEO. Instagram is no different. While the best seo is ‘doing things well’.. below are some tips on how to set up your instagram page to gain the most seo value.
Instagram & SEO
Instagram has rapidly emerged as an indispensable social marketing tool to make your business popular. This is because of the 700 million monthly active users sharing a billion images every day.
In addition, Instagram still enjoys less competition as compared to other social media giants like Facebook or Twitter.
The high level of audience engagement with Instagram can allow you to market your product to a more interested and focused audience without having to spend an enormous amount on paid advertising.
Instagram is your magic spell if you want your brand to be seen by more people, grow a strong following, and increase your conversions at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.
However, it all boils down to how well you leverage the power of Instagram in promoting your business. Here’s how to do it.
To get the best results for SEO you need an Instagram Business Account
You need to make sure your business account on Instagram is different from your personal one, if you want success. Keep in mind that marketing is not about you, but your audience.
While it is nice to show that your brand is personable, selfies of you and your significant other should be kept off limits. They are not going to help you increase sales since they are not relevant to your customers. Click here to know more tips that help you succeed in your business.Â
In fact, as a marketer you should rarely, if ever, appear on your brand’s Instagram page. You also need to take the right steps to optimize it for search engines.
Here’s how you can attain greater customer appeal and optimize your professional Instagram account:
Instagram SEO tip: Include a link to your site’s URL
This is where most of the SEO value comes from. You only get one clickable opportunity on Instagram to lead people directly to your website. Links in your bio are clickable. This is at the top of your Instagram page, right under the description. Make sure you include a link to your targeted landing page, preferably your online shop.
Tips are to try to link directly to your home page rather than using a link tool.
Focus on brand consistency
You need to get the pieces to fit easily if you want to gain recognition for your brand. You can remain recognizable by using the same name, photo, and color palette consistently across all your social media accounts and website. If not, at least choose an Instagram name that is relatable to the name of your business.
Remember, all your engagement and interactions are accompanied by a small little thumbnail of your profile pic. Hence, you need to keep the profile image consistent. Don’t forget to keep it as something recognizable and professional.
Include a catchy bio
People have to click through to your profile if they want to follow you. You can help move things along by creating a catchy, informative, and interesting bio that hooks people into following you.
You need to use this space to convince your potential followers (and customers) that you intend to add value to their feeds.
Keep things light and interesting. Start by including a business name and a short, concise description of what you do. Instagram has a unique culture distinct from other social media sites and online shops. You need to take care of your tone here. Avoid anything that is remotely salesy.
While crafting your bio, keep your targeted Instagram community in mind. Create something that reflects the tone of the kind of content you intend on sharing and which you know will appeal to them.
A fail-safe formula for writing a great bio is to include:
- Your brand
- What it does
- And, its personality
Don’t waste time on researching the right keywords and hashtags. Instagram bio is not searchable. You may want to include a hashtag in the bio during some very special scenarios.
For instance, if you are running a campaign, hashtags in bio could come in useful. It is a good idea to update your bio to promote your latest sale, campaign, or launch.
The only thing you really need to remember here is to not forget the link.
Regular Instagram Posts Help With SEO
Instagram has full customer-hooking abilities as long as you have the right bait. You can gain instant recognition for your brand by leveraging this feature. However, for that you need to create popular posts that are share-worthy.
90% information that gets transmitted to your brain is in the form of visuals. Scientists claim that preference for images is bio-engineered in the human brain. This is why you can make your business more popular by harnessing the effective visual world of Instagram.
Here’s what works on Instagram by way of images.
Avoid hard sells
There are some images you can post that will really help make sales. However, you need to understand that although Instagram is full of shoppers, the culture is not that of a shopping destination.
You need to post images that allow users to frame their own opinions. The right visual should talk about your product and make users aware of your brand, without you really yelling about how great it is.
It is important to remove the dreaded used-car salesman feel and allow users to come to a decision without feeling any pressure from your business. You need to get creative if you want to sway customers your way without coming off as pushy.
Use professional and creative photos
Online shopping has always put great stock in the power of product photos. Be prepared here because Instagram takes that to a whole new level. Detailed images are considered more valuable by 68% customers while making a purchase decision as compared to product description or even reviews from other users.
Also, you need to understand that posting product photos in success is just going to bring the damaging used-car salesman effect back. Instagram users are on your account for a visual treat and not a sales pitch, even though the platform can be described as a social marketplace that converts traffic into sales.
So, how do you drive traffic? You share professional photos that are unique, attention-grabbing and chock full of personality, like an appealing color coordinated series or behind-the-scenes stories.
While posting photos, keep one mantra in your mind that your brand is looking to establish a connection with your followers. If you get this right, your followers will automatically come to you when they are ready to purchase since they are already hooked.
Show off your brand’s personality and aesthetics while flaunting your products. This can add variety and never leave you short of inspiration.
Use relevant SEO keywords in your instagram copy
This helps build metadata so the SEO value of your instagram page is better linked to your site with corresponding keywords.
Resize them for high-quality
You can lose professionalism points with blurred images or awkward crop. Instagram automatically uses a 612 x 612 pixels frame to make your images square. Remember this while choosing a picture if you don’t want to spoil the whole appeal of the photo or have something significant cropped out.
Your images need to reflect professionalism, which inadvertently means that they should be of high-quality. To preserve the quality of your photo, try saving them at double the resolution size.
Keep the size as 1024 x 1024 pixels in Photoshop, so that the quality remains crisp when Instagram resizes the image. There are certain free apps like InstaSize and Squaready that allow posting of rectangular photos on Instagram. These can be great if you just can’t get around to using square images.
Stand out with Instagram’s editing tools
You need to stand out from the crowd if you want your business or brand to become popular. Every day, almost 70 million photos get published on Instagram. You really need to post eye-catchy images if you want to come ahead of the visual competition.
There is a range of in-app filters offered by Instagram that allow you to make those necessary tweaks to your photo. You can enhance colors and moods of your image, just like that. However, be sure that you stay consistent so that your brand’s personality shines through and resonates with your followers.
You are the best judge of what looks good and what doesn’t. But, if you can’t decide it is best to stick with what works best. For instance, as per studies, Mayfair filters tend to attract the most interactions on an average.
Also, images that are lighter and brighter garner 24% more likes as compared to darker images. Images with a single dominant color tend to see a 17% boost in likes, while images with blue as the dominant color win with 24% more likes.
Capture your brand value with lifestyle photos
Your Instagram account is not where you can make a direct sales pitch. But, you can always focus on adding value and increasing brand popularity by playing with your feed. In fact, it is important that you shake things up in your feed and capture the true essence of your brand culture with lifestyle photos.
Lifestyle photos are when you click your products in real life settings. Give users a feel of what your brand and products can do for them in real life. For instance, click those earrings in an actual dinner setting so users know how they will look when wearing on a date.
Use life-inspired models, backgrounds, and scenes to product imagery in a way that captures your brand culture. The idea here is to get people to relate to your brand as a lifestyle choice.
Step 3: Increase Your Instagram Following
You could be doing everything right with your Instagram account, its optimization, and posting of images. But, without the right kind of strategy to get your target audience to start seeing your images, you won’t be able to attain success in building brand value.
Here’s what you can do to reach a potentially larger Instagram following to show off your brand:
Create a team of Instagram ambassadors
You can invite Instagram ambassadors to spread the word about your brand and the benefits it can deliver. You can exponentially increase your outreach by encouraging your existing followers to post photos and reviews.
You increase your opportunities to make conversions when you have more people sharing and praising your brand. 78% people are known to base their purchase decision on what social media influencers recommend.
To create ambassadors who can spread your reach, you need to:
- Come up with intriguing hashtags
- Encourage customers to use your hashtags while sharing their photos and reviews
- Reward these ambassadors by giving them a shout-out
These ambassadors work to get your brand out there.. in a similar way that blogger outreach helps achieve this. Read our guide on tips for blogger outreach.
Widen your discoverability with hashtags
Your content can get buried real quickly since Instagram feeds tend to change fast. The only way to increase the shelf-life of your posts is to use hashtags. These tend to lump multiple posts together linked by a particular keyword into communities that essentially keeps the posts discoverable forever.
88% posts use at least one hashtag and some can go as high as 20. However, it is not advised to go overboard with a single post. Anything with more than 5 hashtags will reduce user engagement an result in a cluttered look.
The best way to do hashtags is to:
- research trending hashtags
- brainstorm relevant phrases and keywords true to your brand
- collect both specific and big-hit tags to make a well-balanced mix
- create a unique hashtag
- always select 5 hashtags that complement your post
It is best to include hashtags in the comments section, so they are less distracting and leaves you with more space to play around.
Include Users’ Content
A great way to promote good feelings is to share your followers’ tagged photos on your Instagram profile. Almost 65% Instagrammers feel special and honored when a brand mentions them. This is a fail-safe way to have your popularity sky-rocket.
Plus, you get the added benefit of followers and their friends coming back on your feed to check their mentions. Make sure you never forget to credit the creator while re-sharing a post. Also, give a shout-out to them in the caption.
From a marketing point of view, including tagged content gives you the same benefits as lifestyle photos, without the added effort. User generated photos are amazing at increasing brand popularity.
The Final Word
The key strategies we have discussed will help you leverage the power of Instagram to promote your business, enhance brand value and increase your sales. SEO is related to having social media accounts – its a ranking factor so its great to have these accounts set up. Essentially you want to have a decent social media page rich in relevant keywords and a link to your site.. that is what works best for SEO. However, you need to make sure that you measure your success (or things that didn’t work) regularly to refine and improve your Instagram strategy.  See our guide here on youtube and seo.