Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in Australia with hundreds of daily users. It’s no longer an app used merely for sharing photographs and short video clips. The social media giant is considered one of the biggest marketing tools and is used by businesses across the world.

A significant percentage of Australian businesses also use Instagram to boost their online visibility and expand their audience. Applying the right search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies to social media marketing tactics go a long way in promoting your brand and building online credibility. It’s also an effective way to get more organic traffic and increase your Instagram followers.

Our social media marketing company can help you with this. Here are a few strategies we help businesses adopt to grow organically.

What Is SEO For Instagram?

Before we discuss which SEO strategies work best for Instagram, let’s quickly look at what SEO for Instagram really means. Essentially, it’s a way for brands to tailor their Instagram content so it appears on multiple places on the platform. This includes the search results, the suggested content feed, and the Explore feed.

The goal of Instagram SEO is to improve your content’s discoverability by helping it rank higher. The more places your content appears at, the more people are likely to view it and discover your brand. This will then help you grow your Instagram following and reach your target audience more effectively.

Here’s how you can make your Instagram search engine optimisation marketing strategy more successful.

Optimise Your Instagram Bio

What you add to your Instagram bio is more important than you think. Many businesses don’t add many—or any—details in their bios. Consequently, their Instagram profile only gives new and existing followers a vague idea of what the brand is all about.

If you want to attract more organic traffic to you Instagram page, you need to optimise your bio. This is one of the best places to include relevant hashtags and popular search terms to ensure the page appears in the search results when users type specific words and phrases. For instance, if you’re a tour organisation based in Canberra, make sure you add relevant search terms like “travel”, “tour company”, “trip organiser”, and “Canberra” in your bio. You can use these as hashtags or in your profile description.

Instagram allow business and creator accounts to add locations to their bios as well. Take advantage of this feature and add your location to your bio so that it accurately defines your target audience and allows your page to show up for location-specific searches.

Additionally, add a URL for your website, blog, or shop in the bio. This will point your followers towards your main web pages. You can also generate organic traffic for these web pages by mentioning it in your post captions (e.g., “Visit the link in our bio for more updates”).

Your Instagram bio is essentially a way for users and the algorithm to determine what your brand does, who it serves, and what kind of content one can expect to see on your page. The better optimised your bio is, the greater the chances of it ranking higher.

Use Keywords to Write Descriptive Captions

Previously, users could only use hashtags, profile/usernames, and locations to search in Instagram Explore. Now, Instagram generates search results based on keywords as well. This means you need to double down on your post captions and make them more descriptive using the right keywords.

An Instagram caption needs to be relevant and specific to the content posted. Writing unnecessary and irrelevant captions are just as detrimental to your page’s SEO as stuffing them with hashtags or not writing one at all. You need to carefully evaluate your choice of keywords and use them strategically in the caption to make an impact and enhance your content’s discoverability.

Use your captions to speak to your audience. Don’t just state things; make your captions engaging and compelling. This will prompt your followers to positively respond to your posts and engage with your content. As a result, your posts will become more visible across the platform. Using the right keywords will also help your page appear in the top results for those keywords and direct the right users to your brand.

You can also add useful hashtags and your brand name in the captions, but don’t forget to target specific search terms as well.

Add Alt Text to Images

Finally, optimise your images by adding alt text. Many businesses already use this image optimisation technique for their websites and blogs. You can now apply the same technique on Instagram too, enhancing your images’ visibility.

Instagram alt text was designed to make the browsing experience easier and more enjoyable for visually impaired users. It’s also an effective SEO strategy. You can select the “Advanced Settings” option to edit the image caption and write optimised alt text. This will replace the automatically generated alt text option, ensuring your description is accurate and describes what the photo actually shows. As a result, your images become more “readable”, giving your SEO rankings a boost.

Hire Our Digital Marketing Experts in Canberra

Ready to create SEO-friendly Instagram content? You’re at the right place.

TocToc provides social media marketing services to businesses to help them boost their Instagram reach. Our digital marketing experts implement the latest and most effective search engine optimisation marketing strategies to help business accounts appear in search results and other Instagram features. We also offer content marketing services to ensure high-quality content is posted online.

Get in touch with our digital marketing company in Canberra today for more details about our online marketing services.