The importance of SEO to any business is by now well understood. We know how important organic rankings are for attracting traffic, leads and conversions that can ultimately contribute to improving a business’s bottom-line. Many brands rely on search engine rankings in order to be found and reached by customers looking for products and services they offer.
In the same way, social media forms a great complementary tool to search engine rankings. Through social media, customers reached via search can be engaged with on a more personal basis, as well as be kept abreast of the goings-on in the company. There are many social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube among others. While many businesses know the importance of having a Facebook and Twitter profile, many still downplay the importance of Instagram.
Having an active Instagram profile can help to boost search rankings in addition to providing yet another platform through which businesses can connect with their audiences. People, especially those of the younger generation, rely on Instagram’s photo-sharing capabilities to share their lives.
Brands can also use this platform to visually connect with their audiences, providing pictures of products, consumers engaging with the brand, experiences among others. However, to make it work, Instagram should be used wisely and considered within the context of your whole online marketing strategy. The following are useful tips to get you on your way.
1. Have a complete Instagram Profile
Like other social platforms, take full advantage of all fields provided on your social media ‘about you’ section to give customers a glimpse into who you really are. Include an image that embodies your brand, e.g. image of your team or logo of the company, and don’t forget to have a link to the official website.
Many times your business will be discovered through social media channels. This is why Instagram is a great platform, especially for brands with shareable visual content. Sharing interesting photographs of different aspects of your business is a useful way to attract attention for your brand. With more people engaging and liking your visual content, you willpiquegenuineinterest in the minds of your potential consumers, who will use information on your profile to visit your website or call for more details.
2. Hashtags are your friends
Hashtags are to an Instagram campaign what keywords are for SEO. Choose relevant hashtags and keywords for your descriptions on order to enable your audience to find your photos, as well as increase the reach of the photos you share. Using hashtags on Instagram allows you to relate your content to trending online topics, which increases their visibility. The following are some basics about choosing and using Instagramhashtags:
- Conduct careful research to find which hashtags are most relevant for your brand as well as the message being put across at the time
- You can also use custom hashtags to enable tracking, organization and promotions of your special content, such as contest information, updates and highlights
- Do not put too many hashtags on a single post, as this is not only amateurish and potentially annoying for your audience, but it would also dilute your message and brand. Choose a few deliberate keywords that directly relate to both brand and message
- Keep up with the trending/popular hashtags and keywords, as well as the comments and likes they generate on the platform. You want to jump in while the trend is still popular, and not when the audience has already seen so much content they are tired of that keyword/hashtag.
Deliberateness should rule your search for and application of hashtags within your Instagram campaign.
3. Connect Instagram to your other social profiles
Ensure that your Facebook and Twitter accounts are active and connected to your Instagram profile. This allows the photos that you post to Instagram to also be shared through your Facebook and Twitter accounts, reaching out to your audiences in all three platforms. What you share on Instagram is posted to your Twitter feed as a link, while on Facebook it is posted as a normal status update ‘via Instagram’. This is also a great way to increase your Instagram followers, since it alerts those who didn’t know about your Instagram profile. Boost discoverability by adding relevant hashtags to the post.
Remember that text shared with your photos will also show up on your Facebook and Twitter, so make your messages short and sweet. You can also share your Instagram content on Twitter as actual images rather than links using a handy app known as IFTTT.
4. Share stories with your images
Don’t just use your Instagram account to post random photos of your products or brandsthatmean nothing to your audience. Just like you create engaging and useful content for your blogs, webpages and social accounts, be creative with the images that you share on Instagram. You can share images with captions that tell stories, or share short videos showing how your products are made or how they can be used.
Share a wide range of photos to avoid boring you fans. Mix product photos and videos with contest updates. Think about providing useful information to your fans. Your Instagram account should add value to their lives.
5. Embed Instagram content in your website
Finally, include engagement triggers in your webpages by embedding videos and photos posted on your Instagram account. This can help you boost SEO as well as increase the reach of both site and platform. If you hosted a contest, for instance, you can add a blogpost about it to your website and embed winning pictures to the site. As you attract more likes and shares, your SEO value also increases.
Embedding content from Instagram is actually quite simple:
- Go to https://instagram.com/your-username
- Select the post you want to embed which expands it
- On the bottom right-hand corner, click on the ‘…’ and select the option Embed
- This gives you an embed code that you can copy and paste onto the HTML of your webpage
Conclusions
Now you have five practical and simple tips you can use to improve your SEO using Instagram. As with all other online marketing techniques, there aren’t any hard and fast methods, only principles that you must apply creatively to maximize your online brand visibility. Ultimately, this attention will trickle down to brand awareness, consumer participation in your activities as well as purchases, which directly boost your bottom-line.
Guest article written by: The author has more than ten years’ experience in SEO and social media marketing with a focus on helping businesses to increase their Instagram followers by utilizing the platform fully. He has shared information on this and more topics in many online forums.