Tips for Using Instagram to Boost Your SEO

How to Use Instagram for SEOToday’s businesses are using many social media platforms as part of their marketing strategy. Instagram is one such medium that will help you boost your SEO. While Google claims not to use social media as a ranking factor, social media experts have proven that this activity does indirectly affect them.

Reasons Your Website Needs an Instagram Account

There are two main ways that developing your brand here can benefit your business, including:

  • By developing your brand, you can improve your domain authority since more people will be talking about it. This increases your search volume, which brings more traffic to your website and improves domain authority. Of course, this also improves your overall ranking as well.
  • When more people engage with you on social media, you become more popular, which drives traffic to your website. People also tend to link content they like to their own content, which gives you more backlinks to your website. This is important when a search engine evaluates your ranking.

Track Your Link’s Success

It’s important to know how many people are clicking on your link. So, when you create a link for in your Instagram profile, you’ll want to do two things:

  • Make sure you always use Google’s URL Builder to add tracking code to the end of it
  • When using a link shortening service like Bit.ly make sure the link’s name matches your brand

Change Your URL Frequently

Unfortunately, Instagram will only let you put a link in your profile – not in each post you make. This is why it’s important to change it out often, based on the campaign you’re currently running or when you want to send more traffic certain places (e.g. different landing pages, product pages, or articles). Thinking of this as your call to action will help you know when to change it and what to change it to.

Use Your Location as Part of Your Call to Action

Each time you publish an image on this social media platform you can customize its location. This is important because it shows up under your username, which is located above the image you’re sharing. If this space isn’t useful for geotagging, at least make sure it’s useful as a call to action. Simply type something there. You won’t ever be asked to verify the location really exists.

Research and Use Hashtags

Researching and using hashtags that get a lot of traffic will help you since Instagram is a search engine in and of itself, meaning you need to play by its SEO rules. Don’t worry about weaving these naturally in your description since you can simply list them at the end of your post.

When you’re ready to run an Instagram campaign and want to make sure you do it right, contact us at Local SEO Tampa Company. Although we’re a SEO company and social media won’t directly impact your rankings here, you still want to optimize your profile to make sure people can find your content. In this way we can help you build the backlinks your site needs and indirectly improve your Google SERPs while we’re at it.