The Importance Of Instagram SEO And How You Can Improve Yours
Online brand visibility allows potential clients or customers to find you around the digital world. Getting known is easier now than ever. Essentially, giving out flyers can help you promote your brand, but that requires a lot of energy and is time-consuming. As a brand owner or a marketer, optimization is key.
Instead of walking around the street handing out leaflets to a few people, why not utilize online platforms to get your brand known more efficiently? Today, there are various social media and websites available for businesses. These platforms can significantly contribute to a brand’s online presence, especially if employed properly.
The Importance of Online Visibility To You And Your Brand
A. Getting your brand known
One way to get your brand known is through flyers, posters, or word of mouth. Another is focusing on strengthening your online brand visibility.
Online visibility lets your customers or clients easily locate and reach out to you. The strength of your online brand visibility is particularly crucial if you are in the process of attracting new customers and expanding your business. Mind you, expanding your business is never-ending.
B. Customer Service is more manageable
You can provide adequate customer service if you have a strong online presence. If your clients or customers know where to find you, they can easily ask for inquiries or support. Through these platforms, you can respond to customer inquiries and complaints quickly.
You can also use your online presence to address potential issues before they arise. Doing so can help potential clients realize that you have outstanding customer service.
C. Increase sales and credibility
Your brand can gain trust and credibility from your online presence. Online visibility is one way to prove that your business is legit. Customers will more likely trust you and do business with you if they see that you have an active website and social media accounts where they can check reviews and services.
Furthermore, increased sales can be attributed to strong online visibility. Customers or clients who can find you easily online are more likely to purchase from you than those who cannot.
SEO: What It Is and Why It Is Essential In Your Business
People utilize search engines to find literally everything online. Search engines are usually where people go first when they need information about the most mundane things, like where you should eat today, how you can potty train your cat, what is the best clothing brand, or what company you should hire to do your regular massage.
In return, search engines provide a valuable opportunity for business owners to direct relevant traffic to their websites through the users’ online search queries.
Search Engine Optimization, widely known as SEO, is the strategy of optimizing the technical configuration of a particular website, the relevance of its contents, and its popularity so that its pages are easier to find, more relevant, and more popular to user search queries, and, as a result, search engines like Google rank them higher in the result page.
It was mentioned above how important online brand visibility is. SEO allows for a strong online presence. SEO means more traffic to your website and more chances to convert leads into customers or clients.
Instagram SEO: What It Is All About
You have learned what SEO is; it is time to focus on one: Instagram. What is Instagram SEO? Basically, Instagram SEO refers to the process of optimizing your Instagram profile and content in order to enhance your visibility in search engines.
Instagram SEO can be accomplished by employing distinct keywords or hashtags. Instagram account optimization for SEO will immensely help you in reaching a vast audience. It can also aid you in growing your Instagram followers.
Instagram SEO: Its Importance
First and foremost, Instagram SEO allows you to reach a vast audience at a time if you rank higher in the search engines. When Instagram users search for specific keywords or hashtags, they will find your content and brand easily.
Instagram SEO helps you gain more followers by improving your online visibility. Some of those who see your content will decide to follow you, and this will lead to a significant increase in your following over time.
Simply posting awesome content does not guarantee that it will be seen by many. Most of your content is unlikely to be seen by anyone other than your most current followers.
If you want your content to be seen by many, you must ensure that it is search engine optimized. You can increase your visibility and reach a larger audience by optimizing your account and content for search engines and Instagram search engine.
Instagram SEO vs. Search Engine SEO
While search engine SEO crawls everything on the internet, as well as social media platforms, and gets the results from there, Instagram SEO crawls your content and profile on the said specific social media platform to rank higher on its search engine.
Your social media pages are likely to appear when people search for your brand on Google. As a result, ensure that your username closely resembles your brand name.
Keep in mind how Google analyzes your Instagram content. Doing so will enable you to get more traffic, regardless of whether customers use Instagram’s internal search or Google.
In general, Instagram SEO is inside the social media platform. It can be made possible by utilizing significant keywords in your profile’s bio and by captioning your posts with relevant hashtags. Instagram SEO, like search engine SEO, is all about using the right keywords to help improve your online visibility.
Users can search for topics or interests in the same way that they would on Google. Instagram users can search for words, phrases, profiles, locations, and hashtags on the platform.
On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO
On-page and Off-page SEO are both essential, but how are they different?
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to SEO factors and techniques that focus on optimizing aspects of your own website that you have control over. Instagram On-page SEO refers to optimization techniques you can perform on your own account. These techniques include keywords in your bio description or captions with relevant hashtags on your photos.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to SEO factors and strategies aimed at promoting your site or brand across the internet. Instagram Off-page SEO refers to actions you can take outside your account to enhance your SEO, such as constructing links from other websites.
Improving Instagram SEO
Having discussed its meaning and importance, what are the ways you can achieve a high ranking on the Instagram search engine?
A. Understand the interests of your target audience.
In every business, knowing the interests of your target audience is essential. If you can identify their interests, you can use them to optimize keywords so that their search queries based on interest will help them find you easily.
Instagram provides two search engine results based on the query: top accounts and top posts. Your bio comes into play now. Include specific keywords that specify the work you do and who you are when writing your bio. In addition, incorporating specific keywords into your bio will enable you to appear higher in search results and attract more followers.
It would be best if you also utilized the appropriate Instagram hashtags to reach a wider audience interested in your service or product. When you employ specific hashtags in your posts, you increase your chances of appearing in search results whenever people are searching for those hashtags.
While it is critical to include as many relevant keywords as possible in your captions, you must not stuff your captions with keywords. If you stuff keywords into your captions, they will be difficult to read, and people will be less likely to interact with your content.
B. Stay consistent.
Consistency is key, indeed. In terms of Instagram SEO, consistency in terms of posting and branding are both crucial.
It is critical to post on a regular basis and to stick to a posting schedule. Otherwise, you earn the risk of losing some followers. People will stop following you if they notice you are not posting on a regular basis.
It’s also critical to keep your posts on a consistent theme. It will be more difficult for people to understand what your account is about if you post about a variety of topics. Your Instagram posts should all be about the same topic or niche related to the business you are running.
Your brand’s core values and theme should be reflected in all of your posts. It should be noted that this theme must spread to all your business platforms.
Furthermore, it would be best if you stuck to a certain style. You should have a set of brand colors that you can use across all images. If your brand is more casual, so should your posts.
C. Do not forget to interact.
Interacting with your followers is an excellent way to stay connected with them. It can also cause them to talk about your brand to other people. Excellent product, service, and customer support can make people talk about your brand.
Being rude on these platforms is the quickest way to be hidden or pushed down the algorithm, so be courteous at all times. Users tend to follow brands that feel personal and relatable, so be genuine and natural, and show up frequently.
Running giveaways is also an effective way of optimizing user interaction. They are an excellent way to engage and connect with your audience.
Make sure to utilize polls. Polls are an excellent way to gather feedback from your followers. Feedback can help increase your credibility and improve certain aspects of your business.
D. Track your progress.
Brand growth through Instagram SEO requires you to keep track of your progress and success. Doing so will give you an insight into what strategies work and what doesn’t. Tracking your progress from time to time will allow you to fine-tune your strategy and continue to expand your business.
Things you can do to track your progress.
- Tracking your engagement is one way to gauge your success. Likes, comments, and shares are all examples of engagement.
- Monitor your reach and the number of people who view your content.
- Check your conversions or amount of users who take an expected action after seeing your brand, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.
- Tracking your traffic is another way to gauge your success. Traffic is the amount of people who visit your website from Instagram.
Final Thoughts
Search engines and Instagram search engines may be different in some aspects, but they are both essential to your business. Learning how to do both will be significantly beneficial to you and your brand.
Optimization and consistency are keys, so never stray away from them.