According to a recent study published on Hootsuite, Instagram is literally the seventh most visited website on the Internet. Roughly 2.9 billion people visit it every single month. All told, it’s the fourth most popular social media platform, and the coveted 18-year-old to 34-year-old demographic makes up an incredible 60% of its total audience. But […]

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But it’s a misconception to think that Instagram is all about sharing photos with friends, family members, and other loved ones. Businesses of all types have experienced an enormous amount of success generating sales on Instagram – and restaurants, in particular, have come out on top. This is why having an Instagram marketing strategy is essential – it helps smaller organizations, in particular, connect to an audience that goes far beyond what they may be able to do through other means.

Why Should Restaurants Have an Instagram Marketing Strategy?

One of the reasons why Instagram marketing is so important to restaurants, in particular, is because it’s visual. That’s not to say that other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter don’t have their strengths. Facebook could be a great way to post announcements about certain events that you’re having in great detail. Twitter is a perfect way to get short-form content out there, like letting people know about a change in your menu. But with Instagram, you have that added visual flair – something that helps connect with people in a bold new way.

Another recent study revealed that about 65% of people are visual learners. In order to retain information, they need to see it. The same source indicated that the human brain can process images and videos roughly 60,000 times faster than text alone.

If you take a basic piece of content and present it in two ways to people – one in a text-based blog post and the other visually in the form of something like an infographic – the vast majority of people will choose the infographic. This is true despite the fact that they’re being presented with essentially the same thing in just two different formats.

From that perspective, it’s not a surprise that Instagram has been such a boost for restaurants. People don’t necessarily want to read about your menu, they want to see the dishes, and they want to see the variety. They want to see what the inside of your location looks like. What better way to do that than in the form of a compelling image? Instagram puts the visual part of marketing front and center, whereas other avenues like Facebook do not. That simple idea is the key to much of the success you can enjoy with the right Instagram marketing strategy.

Tips On How To Market A Restaurant On Instagram

One of the most important things to understand about restaurant marketing on Instagram is that there truly is no “one size fits all” approach to what you’re doing. There’s not necessarily a hard and firm roadmap to follow – different things work for different businesses.

First and foremost, you need to start with the people who matter most of all: your audience. What do they like, and what do they dislike? What do they want to see? In many ways, it’s no different from the way you initially shaped your menu. Having said that, there are a number of best practices that you can follow to help make the most effective impression that you can and reach your restaurant business plan targets. They include but are certainly not limited to the following.

1. Post About Giveaways

Success in terms of social media marketing – especially on a platform like Instagram – ultimately comes down to your ability to engage with your audience. Giveaways and contests are a fun way to do that – who doesn’t like to win something? Try to get creative with your promotions in a way that builds excitement and anticipation. Yes, there will only be one winner – but as people engage more, you’ll also see an uptick in likes, comments, and tags.

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You could tell your followers to take a guess on how many of a particular dish will be sold that day, for example. You could ask people to guess how many ingredients you go through in a week. Once you get the conversation started, the momentum will build on its own. You could award the best guesses with discounted meals or even free merchandise with your restaurants’ branding like a personalized apron, a hat, a cutting board, and more.

2. Post Images, Videos, Reels, Stories, and Go Live

Again, the strength of Instagram is that it is arguably the most visually oriented of all the social networks – something that puts restaurants in a unique position to thrive. Nothing gets people more excited than a compelling image of a delicious-looking meal. However, you also need to make sure you’re varying the type of content that you’re posting. Don’t just post images. Try to be on top of social media trends and get a heads up when competitors publish new Instagram posts.

You could also take videos of your kitchen staff preparing meals, giving people a “behind the scenes” look at how you operate.

Take full advantage of some of the more innovative aspects of the platform, like the “Reels” and “Stories” features. The “Stories” feature is a great way to let your followers know when you’ve posted new content, even if they haven’t already seen it in their feed. When you post a regular image or similar piece of content, it gets mixed in with all of the other accounts that they’re following. But when you post to “Stories,” there is a badge at the top of someone’s feed letting them know that there is a new post. This is especially helpful for timely promotions – like specials that you may have around Christmas time or if you’re having a New Year’s Eve bash.

Whenever possible, go live – meaning you’re giving people a real-time look into your restaurant’s operations. Keep in mind that live content usually gets people to watch 27% longer than pre-recorded content, and it keeps people’s attention for about 24 minutes on average. This could be the perfect way to show off your specials for the night, show off recent renovations you’ve made, or even just give people a tour through your restaurant to highlight what makes you special.

3. Interact with Followers and Reward Them

If there is a recurring theme to a lot of these tips, engagement would undoubtedly be it. It isn’t just enough to give people a passive Instagram experience as a restaurant – meaning that you’re just posting images, and you don’t really check your page beyond that. You need to engage with them, which means you need to interact with your followers in a way that keeps the conversation going.

Rewarding your Instagram followers can be a perfect chance not just to build an audience but also to keep them coming back to your page for more, too. To generate more likes or tags, you could tell your followers that “the 51st person to tag us on this post will earn a discounted meal.” You could say, “if this post receives 300 likes, we’ll exclusively reveal our next special on Instagram.” The rewards themselves don’t have to be huge – they just need to incentivize people to stay engaged with the content you’re posting.

Sometimes rewards aren’t even necessary – people just want to be part of your Instagram games and challenges to entertain themselves.

4. Explore Your Competitors on Instagram

Another key tip involves paying attention to what a lot of your competitors are doing on Instagram. Check as many local restaurants as you can and see what is working and, more importantly, what isn’t. Both sides of the equation will give you an invaluable wealth of information to learn from – and you can select what successful techniques you think would work for your audience and leave the rest aside.

5. Encourage Customers to Follow Your Account

One of the most overlooked aspects of restaurant Instagram marketing involves calls-to-action. If someone is engaged with your business, they’ll be willing to take some next step – they just have to know what it is to do so. Therefore, including calls-to-action in your posts is a crucial step. It can be something as simple as “if you liked this video, be sure to follow our account to find out more about our restaurant.” So long as you’re able to guide people, they’ll be more than willing to follow you – you just have to take that first step.

6. Share Videos and Stories

Another essential aspect of restaurant marketing on Instagram (and on social media in general, for that matter) involves sharing as many videos and stories as you can. Video content creation is hard and it takes a great deal of time – but in the fast-paced digital world that we’re now living in, consistency is king.

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Therefore, there will be times when you don’t necessarily have something new to post. That’s okay because you can share a relevant image or news item to keep people checking your profile. Maybe you’re friends with another local restaurant owner, and you want to do some cross-promotion. Maybe there’s an industry topic that you can record a video about to give your unique insight. Regardless, it’s a great way to keep the content stream flowing.

7. Try Instagram Ads

Instagram Ads are another great way to boost your exposure even further. For example, it’s estimated that as many as 130 million people per month click on shopping ads that they see. For a restaurant, this can be huge – once again exposing your business to an audience that is far beyond the one that currently exists. Combined with additional methods such as local PPC, email marketing, or SEO, digital ads, in general, bring the most productive results.

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If you are considering using Instagram ads and going into it for the first time, be sure to set smaller budgets and time frames for your campaigns. Try out both Instagram stories ads and feed ads. Experiment and see what works best for you before spending a more significant amount of money. Check out these tips for creating Instagram Ads for better engagement and more efficient first-time campaigns.

8. Partner with Influencers and Food Bloggers

Partnering with local area influencers and food bloggers is also another great way to get noticed in terms of restaurant marketing on Instagram. You could reach out to someone with a larger audience and offer them a free meal if they’ll review it on their channel.

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It is important to identify high-quality influencers without fake followers. You do, however, have to be clear about your relationship with this person – although the same will undoubtedly be true of them for the sake of ethics.

9. Feature Posts from Customers

Another great tip to master restaurant marketing on Instagram involves featuring posts from customers. It’s another form of generating as much social proof as you can – something that is hugely important these days.

So if a customer comes into your restaurant, enjoys themselves, and posts a particularly enthusiastic message about it, be sure to feature that post so that others can see it. It’s been estimated that as many as 93% of people look to customer reviews when they’re dealing with a business they aren’t familiar with. Featuring positive posts from customers may just be the thing that gets someone to come down off the fence and come into your restaurant.

10. Reward Posts from Customers

Finally, we have the idea of rewarding posts from customers – something that is similar to holding a giveaway, albeit in a slightly different way. Again, you could say something like, “if this post gets a certain number of shares, we’ll reveal an exciting new piece of news about our menu here before we tell anyone else.” Or you could allow people to offer input into what your next special should be or which items you should substitute off your menu.

It doesn’t matter what the reward is – it matters that the reward is there. That’s what keeps people coming back to check on your content, which is ultimately what keeps them engaged with your restaurant. The longer that goes on, the more loyalty you instill in them – which will have them telling their friends and family members about you, too.

Final note

In the end, Instagram and restaurants really are the perfect pairing for a variety of reasons. For starters, it’s a platform that skews towards a younger audience, a generation that is most likely to eat out in the first place – a perfect storm for a growing restaurant.

Instagram users are nothing if not active, meaning that you’re likely to attract a large set of people with each post without getting lost in the noise that you would on other sites like Facebook. But most crucially, Instagram is visual by its very nature – and food is a perfect pairing with that. That’s why, when leveraged properly, the right Instagram marketing strategy could very likely take your business to a whole new level.

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The post 11 Best IG Tools to Get More Followers, Engagement, & Sales appeared first on .

The advent of social media has connected people across the globe in a way that was never possible before. Over 57.6% of the world’s population uses social media, with around 13 new users every second.

Instagram alone has over a billion active users. It’s the second most popular social media platform for marketers and has a much higher engagement rate than Facebook. It allows marketers to focus on their visually appealing products and content to connect with customers better.

But posting and ghosting is not the way to go about on Instagram. You need to engage with your audience regularly with content that appeals to their interests, and doing this manually can get tedious and is unnecessarily time-consuming.

Good thing many Instagram tools can do the heavy lifting for you by automating tasks like scheduling posts, measuring analytics, creating stunning design templates for your content, and optimizing your profile for greater results.

However, with the overwhelming number of IG tools available online, it isn’t easy to decide which one you should go for. So we’ve picked some of the best tools to help you get started on your journey to a more seamless Instagram experience optimized for the results you desire.

11 best IG tools you should consider

Here are the best IG tools you should check out. We’ve covered the pros, cons, and more details.

1. Tailwind

Tailwind is mainly known for its ability to schedule Instagram posts, but it does a little bit of everything. It helps you plan your content ahead of time while also optimizing your content to get the best results. You can create incredible designs with ease. It also comes with an intelligent recommendation feature if you’re stumped for ideas.

It’s one of the most intuitive apps for curating your Instagram page. It’s your social media marketing team, and growth partner rolled into one neat little app.

The app (for Android and iOS) is easy to use, thanks to the simple visual interface. For creatives that often fall prey to writer’s block, caption templates in the app can be a lifesaver. All in all, it’s an excellent solution for small businesses and individuals.

Pros:

• Automatically publishes content at the optimal time
• Pre-made caption templates
• Instagram hashtag finder helps you quickly find hashtags
• In-built bio creator
• User-friendly interface

Cons:

• You can only schedule to one Instagram account with the Pro plan

Best suited for: Small businesses, startups, individuals

Pricing: You can get the essential tools to use for free for an unlimited period. The priced subscriptions offer more features and start with the Pro plan at $19.99/month. This is followed by the Advanced plan at $39.99/month and the Max plan at $79.99/month.

You might also want to check out our guide on how to use Tailwind to schedule to Instagram and Pinterest.

2. IconoSquare

Iconosquare is a great app that helps you understand your audience’s behaviors. It’s an Instagram analytics tool that’s perfect for the needs of medium to large-sized businesses looking to amp up their Instagram marketing processes.

The app displays IG post metrics in an easy-to-understand manner to help you analyze post-performance and tweak your strategy for better results. It also has some other stunning features like multi-profile management from a single dashboard, a highly intuitive post scheduler that recommends best posting times, and geolocation tagging.

Pros:

• Detail analysis for Instagram stories
• Tracks competitors
• Helps you figure out what drives engagement
• Creates detailed and simple performance reports

Cons:

• Filter options are difficult to navigate through
• Doesn’t differentiate clearly between promoted posts and organic ones
• Servers tend to lag in some regions of the world

Best suited for: Mid-size and larger businesses

Pricing: The Pro plan costs $49/month, while the Advanced plan costs $79/month. It has a third, Enterprise plan offered at a customized price per your requirement.

3. Canva

Canva has quickly gained popularity in the general marketing sphere due to its vast collection of templates and designs that are incredibly easy to use. It has template designs specifically for the dimensions of Instagram’s posts and stories, making it super convenient for you to create professionally-looking posts in minutes.

Its most unique template is the “carousel” for multi-photo posts, which gives an almost panoramic feel when swiping between photos.

Canva is entirely a content design platform where you can edit videos, icons, stories, and photos so that the dimensions fit perfectly in the social media app. The templates are also inspiring and helpful if you require a specific theme or layout.

It’s perfect for beginners that want to gain experience in designing attractive content that captures the brand image. Additionally, it’s also a budget-friendly tool that can easily be employed by small businesses or even freelance digital marketers. It recently added scheduling features that let you publish on Instagram.

Pros:

• Templates are easy to edit
• Create a color palette so you can stick to your brand’s theme
• Scheduler lets you directly schedule to Instagram business accounts and other social networks like LinkedIn and Tumblr
• Ideal for beginners who lack experience with editing software
• Create original stickers for your stories

Cons:

• Isn’t ideal for advanced editing
• Lacks vector designs
• The mobile app is not very precise and intuitive

Best suited for: Freelance digital marketers, small businesses, startups

Pricing: Canva’s free plan lets you use its free templates and elements to create content. The Pro plan comes at $12.99/month, while the Enterprise plan is offered at a customized price.

You might also want to check out our articles on Canva alternatives.

4. Kicksta

Instagram Tool, Kicksta promises more organic, genuine Instagram followers and engagement than random followers and spam accounts that clog the brand’s Instagram feed. It uses AI-powered technology to steer its users’ social media accounts in the right direction and get more followers and eyes to their profile—all while steering clear of bots and fake accounts.

Pros:

• Organic, targeted engagement
• Clear dashboard console with tabs for monitoring and analytics
• Functions without installing software
• Grow your Instagram following organically

Cons:

• Pricey enrollment fee
• Time-intensive process of establishing the followers’ list
• Lack of transparency in followers, hashtags, etc.
• Unpredictable growth rate

Best suited for:

• Brands that cater to a national or international audience rather than a local audience
• Kicksta can be used as a supplement to organic audience growth efforts by startups

Pricing: There are two pricing options available: the standard plan for $49 which includes “moderate” growth speed, video onboarding, and ten targets, and the premium plan for $99, which promises “maximum” growth speed, video onboarding, 40 targets, VIP email support, live chat support, advanced targeting, and a blacklist.

5. Agorapulse

Agorpulse is a one-stop platform for agencies that require social media coordination on a single dashboard. It combines features found on social media and project management platforms to truly bring a seamless collaboration experience to you and your team by providing all the features you need for end-to-end social media management.

It offers features similar to Hootsuite but in a way that would be more useful to agencies. The shared calendars and reporting tools are a great way to keep the team on track with your Instagram marketing agenda.

Pros:

• Shared calendars
• Assign user roles to include clients in the process
• Power Reports feature
• Filters negative comments and spam
• Social listening
• Unified social inbox

Cons:

• Lacks Instagram grid preview
• Difficult to reorder photos when scheduling a carousel post
• Can’t reschedule Instagram posts in the queue

Best suited for: Small to medium-sized digital marketing agencies

Pricing: Agorapulse offers four pricing plans: the free plan, the Pro plan at $79/month, the Premium plan at $259/month, and the customized Enterprise plan.

6. Hootsuite

A powerful social media management tool, Hootsuite handles everything from collecting user generated content, scheduling posts, and monitoring analytics to advertising your page. This all-in-one management platform is one of the most advanced IG tools with intuitive features which help you batch-create and schedule posts at the most optimal time for high engagement, listen to the latest social media conversations and create relevant content along with making brand-consumer engagement easier than ever.

The tool is ideal for larger businesses that need to handle multiple accounts and users across the organization. It also supports easy integration with major marketing apps online, helping you streamline your content plan across different platforms.

Pros:

• Super easy user interface
• Provides influencers suggestions to boost your conversions and followers
• Monitors comments, likes, and messages in one place
• Assign tasks to users

Cons:

• Difficulty tagging people in videos
• Doesn’t offer hashtag suggestions

Best suited for: Large businesses that would prefer integrating their social media with other marketing software

Pricing: The Professional plan costs $49/month, the Team plan costs $129/month, and the Business plan costs $599/month. A customized plan is also available under Enterprise.

7. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is an affordable Instagram management tool that doesn’t overwhelm you with shiny things. It’s extremely straightforward in its functioning and is simple to use with exciting functionality like pre-scheduling and batch-creating posts, content suggestions, and website-to-Instagram integrations.

The app is heaven-sent for solo entrepreneurs that want to grow their business quickly and efficiently by studying top-performing content and trends likely to get them more traction.

Pros:

• Easy set up and has a chatbot for assistance
• Schedules content to post at optimal times
• Daily reminders and suggestions to help your page grow
• Offers content pre-scheduling
• Lets you publish content to IG from your own blog or website

Cons:

• Mostly suggested content is by other Crowdfire users
• The dashboard gets overwhelming if you’re using multiple Instagram accounts
• Tends to attract the follow-for-follow crowd

Best suited for: Individual entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to grow their ventures effectively.

Pricing: Crowdfire offers a free plan besides monthly subscription plans. The Plus plan costs $9.99/month, the Premium plan is $49.99/month, and the VIP plan is $99.99/month.

8. SocialInsider

SocialInsider equips you with analytical tools that help you better understand your Instagram visitors and the algorithm. You can also use it for competitive analysis, to determine where you stand on the platform, get detailed reports about your Instagram performance and understand brand metrics.

If utilized well, the app can help you improve relationships with your current and potential customers and create the best content for your audience. It’s best suited for digital agencies that work across various industries.

Pros:

• Generates benchmark reports for Insta, TikTok, YouTube, and more networks
• Tracks competitor pages
• Monitors campaign performance

Cons:

• Expensive for its relatively limited features
• Not very useful for brands with a small following

Best suited for: Medium to large business and digital marketing agencies

Pricing: SocialInsider offers three pricing plans, starting with the Social Media Manage plan at $83/month, the Small Agency plan at $141/month, and the Agency plan is customized.

9. Keyhole

Keyhole is an industry-leading social listening and analytics tool along with an Instagram influencer marketing app. It’s used by Netflix, the BBC, and NBC, courtesy of its unique features and individually-vetted influencer suggestions, tailored for each business.

The social listening segment of the app lets you understand what your audience is talking about to give you a gist into potential content topics likely to get more eyes to your profile. It also analyzes your audience’s sentiment and gives you tone-based information, so you don’t send the right social media message at the wrong time.

On the other hand, the influencer marketing segment of the app helps you manage influencer campaigns seamlessly by assisting you end-to-end from influencer vetting to campaign reporting. You can also use the data to improve your influencer outreach campaigns.

Pros:

• In-depth profile analysis
• Real-time data
• Simplified influencer marketing
• Event marketing tool
• Sentiment analysis and social media listening

Cons:

• The interface can be complex at first
• An expensive investment

Best suited for: Medium to large companies that want to integrate influencer marketing into their campaigns

Pricing: Keyhole uses custom pricing for all its users. You can get in touch and discuss your requirements to determine the price point.

10. Smartly.io

Smartly.io brings automated marketing to your fingertips. You can enhance your Instagram advertising campaigns by viewing thousands of variations from a single ad idea and analyzing and using the one that’s likely to get you the best results. So, you can create, edit, and monitor your ad performance on social media—from a single dashboard with detailed reporting and Instagram insights.

It’s ideal for larger agencies that need to optimize ad performances for their clients. Smartly.io also comes with automated budget allocation and optimization, ensuring you get the best bang for your buck when it comes to ads.

Pros:

• Huge collection of templates for visuals
• Flexible payment options
• Generates thousands of ad variations
• A/B testing

Cons:

• The user interface takes some getting used to
• Very expensive

Best suited for: Established digital marketing agencies and media buyers that cater to clients looking for ad optimization

Pricing: Smartly.io charges a percentage fee on your total ad spending. The platform charges a flat fee of $5,645 for ad spending below $112,845. Beyond that, it charges 5% for spending up to $169,265. The percentage fee reduces by 0.5% after every additional $56,420 spent.

11. Buffer

Buffer is a social media management suite tool that helps you create, edit and manage your Instagram profile from one dashboard. It measures your social media performance in a single click to give you an overview of your growth and engagement over time, helps you collaborate with your teammates, and better optimize your campaigns. Most of all, it enables you to respond to comments at twice the speed.

It has a super intuitive interface and makes social media teams faster, smarter, and efficient in content creation, social media monitoring, and customer engagement for greater Instagram growth.

Pros:

• Powerful Instagram marketing tool with a clean user interface
• Pre-scheduling posts across multiple platforms including Instagram
• Organizing content
• Customizable posts across different platforms
• Easy posting—even in offline mode
• Seamless integration with WordPress, Pocket, etc

Cons:

• Specialized posts (for instance, carousel pictures) are not supported
• Doesn’t have features of viewing incoming mentions and messages

Best suited for: Bloggers, freelance social media managers, small businesses, and agencies with a versatile clientele base

Pricing:

• Buffer follows a freemium pricing model where you can connect up to three social media accounts with maximum scheduling of 10 posts

• The Pro plan costs $15/month and allows you to connect up to eight social media accounts with maximum scheduling of 100 posts

• The Premium plan costs $65/month and allows maximum scheduling of 2000 post

• For large brands, the Business plan costs $99/month and offers connection with up to 25 social media accounts, six users, and allows maximum scheduling of 2000 posts

Further, Buffer offers compartmentalization of features of Buffer such as analytics, community management, data insights, etc.

Did you find the best Instagram marketing tool?

Social media management tools are the key to keeping your business fresh during the age of mass consumption. They help you optimize your content and feed for a fraction of the cost in time and money.

Without them, you will likely need to invest in a large social media team to manually come up with ideas and analyze data at the same time to pick the optimal time to share that content. And even then, the performance would be relatively less due to error and subjectiveness.

Use this article to pick the best tool or a combination of tools for your Instagram needs, and give your team the features they need to truly grow your Instagram presence and take your brand to the next level with increased exposure and conversions.

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With one billion monthly active users, and an equal amount of content created in proportion, SEO plays a big role in aiding reach and discovery on Instagram.

The search feature on Instagram is an integral part of the user experience. Similar to what you would do on Google, use the search bar on the Explore page to discover new content, hashtags, new accounts, and locations.

SEO also plays an important role in displaying new suggested posts from accounts you don’t directly follow.

According to Instagram, these suggestions are based on posts from accounts that you follow and posts similar to ones you liked or saved before.

With an Instagram Marketing and SEO strategy, you can ensure that the posts are available as relevant search results on the Explore page and inside content feeds.

This is one of the best tactics to reach a new audience and give your content the visibility you want. It’s a great way to create a unique personalized marketing experience for your followers.

What is SEO on Instagram?

SEO on Instagram is about creating content or creating videos online in a way that they reach multiple places at once, starting from search results to gaining a place on the Instagram feed.

SEO is essential to improve the life and discoverability of your content to get more eyeballs and sell more products on Instagram.

SEO on Instagram derives itself from a user’s activity on the platform.

The user activity consists of the hashtags the user follows or the accounts they follow and engage with. This gives us an idea of the content they like. Accounts and hashtags the user interacts with will rank higher on the feed than the ones they don’t interact with.

Here are the results when I search “woodworking” from an Instagram account where I follow a number of travel writers and brands. My account posts woodworking updates primarily.

I follow most of the top search results and have interacted with them before. Comparatively, the search results on different accounts are entirely different.

The top recommendations change depending on who searches. And Instagram tailors each result based on the user’s past engagement and history with accounts.

For brands, it’s all about reach. Understand the hashtags your target audience may use to encourage engagement with your social media content. For example, if you write about credit cards, look for Instagram hashtags that keep alive a credit-fuelled lifestyle, like pricey hotels, luxury cars, and more.

The more people discover your content, the better the odds of growing your following.

Instagram’s algorithm processes every single piece of content on the app, piecing together information that helps it determine what the post is about and who it is for. It does all of this automatically, but with the help of a few signals done right, you can make sure that Instagram SEO works for you.

Here are a few ways to consistently increase the discoverability of your content.

Instagram SEO Ranking: Key Factors

Every time an individual uses Instagram, the company tracks movements to collect data about each user. Since Instagram gathers around 69% of personal data, it helps to create an algorithm that provides users with useful information.

When you optimize Instagram posts for SEO, the Instagram algorithm adds extra information to make them rank better.

That begs the question as to what the most important signals are that help optimize your content for you:

According to Instagram, the most important SEO ranking signals are:

1. The algorithm matches what you searched before with top posts, accounts, tags, and places. This is the most important factor.
2. User activity: If Instagram thinks someone is more interested in one post over the other, it will start to prioritize that over the other in search results. What gets shown in search results is determined to a large degree based on the user’s previous activity.
3. Information about the search results: When there’s a high volume of results, the ranking is determined by the number of shares, likes, and follower counts for a particular account.

For your Instagram SEO strategy— improve your ranking by identifying your content. When someone does a search, Instagram knows what to include in the results.

6 Instagram SEO Tactics to Increase Your Discoverability

#1 Optimize your Instagram profile for search

Your Instagram bio is the best place for you to include relevant keywords as well as search terms.

Instagram bio SEO starts with choosing the right username. Include the right keywords along with your brand name.

If you search for a keyword like woodworking, you’ll see that all the top results for the term include the word “woodworking” in the handle or their bio or both.

That’s no accident.

Also, as a final step, include a location in the bio if it’s relevant to your business. Business and Creator accounts can add a location to their account. If you haven’t already switched to a business account, do that now.

To add a profile location for Instagram bios, open the Instagram app and tap on the profile icon. Tap Edit Profile, then access the Contact Options. Enter your address and be as specific as you want with the details. You can enter the street details too.

In the settings, tap on the option to Display location information publicly. When done right, it helps to generate inbound leads for your business as your profile attracts the right target audience.

#2 Write Descriptive Captions With Keywords

Until now, you could search on Instagram using hashtags, tags, usernames, and profile names. This has now changed massively. Today you can search using keywords similar to how you would conduct a search on Google. If you have a dearth of ideas, dig into your newsletters and repurpose ideas from them that you can use for your social campaigns.

When someone types into the bar and what he types is the most important signal that determines what results are served to you. Based on the search terms, Instagram looks for usernames, bios, captions, hashtags, and locations. As brands on Instagram, you can understand this better with the help of social media monitoring tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite Insights.

This means if you write relevant descriptive captions with the right choice of keywords, this improves the discoverability of your content.

Using relevant descriptive keywords in your Instagram captions allows your content to appear on the results page. If you’re planning many posts and need inspiration, then the best social media management tools give you content and hashtag suggestions. You can also get insights about when is the best time to post to maximize engagement.

#3 Add Keywords to the Instagram Bio

If you want to optimize your follower growth, use Instagram search to your advantage. If you want to rank for a keyword, add that keyword to your name or username since you can search for both on Instagram.

If you can’t add a keyword to the username, add keywords to your name field in the bio description. Pandora uses a single-line bio to describe what it does.

This is how you improve your chances of appearing on the top results when someone searches for the target keywords.

#4 Include Up to 30 or More Relevant Hashtags

Use relevant, targeted hashtags on posts and on stories to get discovered by audiences on Instagram.

If you have a public channel add hashtags to the content and make your post visible on the hashtags results page.

Here’s a post from Gym Express. Look at all the hashtags it has added.

Since hashtags are used to discover new content, the right hashtags will help put your account before the right audience, even if they haven’t seen your content before.

That’s why you need a clear strategy, and without this, you can miss opportunities to gain followers and drive engagement.

#5 Enrich your Instagram Images with Rich Alt Text

Instagram’s alt text feature lets you add custom text for richly describing your photos. The feature improves the accessibility of your content on the platform. It can also boost SEO benefits.

Instagram automatically generates alt text for images uploaded on its platform so people can hear descriptions through screen readers.

This is through object recognition technology that generates an automated description of images but is mostly a hit or miss.

You can also add alt text when creating new content and add extra detail and keywords.

Also, here’s a quick guide to help with that:

To add alt text to a post, tap on advanced settings at the screen’s bottom before you start posting.

Write the alt text in the box and tap on done. To change the alt text, go to the photo, click on it, and then tap the three dots on the right corner and click edit.

Once you click edit, you get options to add a location or alt text.

Access the alt text option under accessibility.

This creates a much better Instagram experience.

#6 Be Consistent in Your Efforts

Another simple tactic is being consistent on Instagram.

The more you follow these practices, the more the algorithm rewards you.

This consistency shows Instagram who you are and what you can offer. Your profile and content will reach more users as they browse Instagram.

Look at how posts from Elf Cosmetics populate the Explore page when “lipgloss” is searched:

This is because of two reasons.

The first is its impressive posting frequency. It posts new content multiple times a day.

The second is its use of keyword-rich captions.

By putting in your efforts to maintain your brand message, you will get the rewards of better reach in no time.

With a few tweaks and some simple improvements, take advantage of Instagram searches with suggested posts.

With these tips, you can grow a strong, highly engaged, relevant audience online on Instagram.

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