You’ve doted a tremendous amount of TLC, SEO, and maybe some other abbreviations to your website – but where’s that same love for your social media?

We’re talking about your company’s Instagram account in particular. Not many marketers and entrepreneurs are aware of this, but the same optimization tricks you use to rank your website on Google can be applied to your Instagram, too.

If you know how to apply certain SEO strategies to your Insta, you won’t need to pay for influencers or film yourself doing something silly to gain more followers, boost sales, and encourage more engagement.

Instagram is arguably the social media platform that benefits most from SEO, because it works like a mini search engine – it ranks optimized pages higher, and as such, these pages have a better chance to accrue more active followers as ‘page trust score’ improves.

Here are four simple techniques you can use immediately to optimize your Instagram account.

Creating a Cohesive Instagram Page

This unwritten law of Instagram is well known, but most aren’t aware that keeping your Insta feed cohesive actually enhances your SEO.

You’ll get a ranking boost on your Instagram page if you’re thoughtful in your visual concepts, captions, hashtags, and even the timing of your posts. For top rankings, you’ll need to carefully consider every aspect of your Insta page and how they work together. Every caption and hashtag matters. Even how you lay out your Insta grid can factor into your SEO.

Combin Scheduler is an excellent tool to streamline your Insta content planning, allowing you to craft optimized captions, group different sets of hashtags, and revise current Instagram campaigns well in advance (we’re talking days, even weeks).

Here’s a short guide on building that cohesive Insta feed with smart content scheduling:

Alternatively, there are powerful social media automation tools like Bulk.ly, that take all the work and tedium of manual posting out of the equation, saving you time and effort best spent somewhere else. Working with Buffer, which many social media managers already utilize,Bulkly allows you to upload content in “bulk,” grouping it into categories, recycling your social media updates, and automatically sending them to your Buffer account. In other words, ultimately helping you create a more cohesive Instagram feed, with less work.

Use Relevant Hashtags

You’re probably already hashtagging a lot of your posts, but there are two common errors users make: They aren’t using relevant hashtags, or they aren’t using hashtags at all.

When choosing the right hashtags for your post, for best Instagram optimization, you’ll want to do a bit of research before publishing. There a number of tools you can use, like Combin Growth. This tool helps you find hashtags that are relevant to your upcoming post, or your business as a whole, as well as recommended tags your competitors are using.

You might also like…#Hashtag Do’s and Don’ts

One small hack to add – always be referencing competitors and the hashtags they use. But at the same time, don’t use uber-popular hashtags like those ones with over 100K posts. Your content will be buried in minutes.

Finally, if you’re not using hashtags at all…well, you need to start. This is how Instagram feeds are organized, and therefore a key metric in Instagram page optimization. Remember the importance of a cohesive account? Hashtags play a major role in that.

Change Location Tags

Fully-online businesses or those that offer worldwide shipping often forget about updating location tags, which is another way to boost your Insta’s SEO.

Local businesses don’t need to worry about location tags too much, since you’re more or less operating in one general area, and you don’t want to attract irrelevant audiences.

If your reach extends past local, however, you can speak to different audiences in other countries by simply changing your location tags – when it’s relevant and necessary – every now and then.

Use Alt-Text on Your Images

Alt-text’s originally intended purpose was accessibility, allowing visually-impaired people to enjoy visual-based content online. Marketers started to use it as another optimization trick for SEO on websites, and the same technique can be applied to your Instagram’s images, too.

The tool is actually already built right into the Instagram platform. Scroll to the bottom of a page with a caption while you’re posting new content, and click on Advanced Settings. Scroll to the bottom again, and you should see Write Alt Text. Hit it, and you can input a description of your image (i.e. man-eats-12-raw-eggs).

So, if someone inputs a search like ‘man eating raw eggs’, your content will come up in their search results.

Keep these four tips in mind the next time you log into your Instagram account, and don’t be afraid to apply other SEO strategies to your page, too. SEO is just as powerful of a tool on social media as it is on search, so make the most of it by boosting your ranking and improving feed visibility with the skills you already have!

Need help getting your social media accounts optimized and running? Eden Advertising’s social media experts can set-up and populate your favourite social media accounts to garner more followers, engagements, and sales.