Your Instagram content can now be discovered and ranked on the Web: Is yours ready?
Did you hear?
After months of taking feedback from its users around the difficulty of organic reach, Instagram has announced that as of 10th July 2025 all your content on there will be indexed by search engines like Google. [1]
In this blog post I am breaking down exactly what it means and how you are going to use it to YOUR advantage.
Great, but what does this mean?
It means that anything you post or have on social media from this date will be able to be shown (and even ranked) by search engines, meaning that they get in front of new eyes much faster and with a lot less effort. This may widen your audience further to people who may not even be on social media.
Let’s also bear in mind that AI models such as ChatGPT now also search online using context-rich analysis to gather relevant content sources to return in their responses [2], therefore your content must be able to answer questions and give clear descriptions as to how it meets your audience’s needs.
But, if we can master Social SEO, gone will the days be of posting and praying that your posts get seen within the first 2-4 days - search results are forever.
Tell me what to do, what is Social SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the name of the efforts given to optimise all your website content to make it as accessible, authoritative and trustworthy as possible to search engines. It gets ranked in terms of quality by Google, so it’s important to make it as helpful and discoverable as possible.
Social SEO put simply is applying SEO principles to your social media content [3]. Now it is a ‘MUST’ and no longer a ‘nice to have’ in your social media strategy.
Where and how to apply Social SEO
Let’s take your business’ Instagram profile as our example.
In the profile details
· Name – Adding key words about what you do into your name e.g. ‘MFD Marketing’ -> ‘MFD Marketing | Digital marketing and branding’
· Instagram handle – Being tactical with your name by adding your service into it e.g. Helen who runs a baking business -> ‘@helenbakescakes’
· Bio tagline and links – Adding key words into your tagline and links to trustworthy sources, such as your own website URL
· Names of highlights – Using descriptive full word names for your highlights where possible
In the content
· Images – Instagram automatically generates Alternative text (Alt text) [4] for your images so that they can be read by a screenreader. But adding the text descriptions yourself allows you to use more key words and phrases and to give much richer context for the person listening
· Reels – Adding closed captions [5] onto your reels, especially talking to camera, gives rich context of the video content and helps it to be found more easily
· Carousel posts – Carousels are fantastic for educational pieces of content with their multi-slide format, exploit this with more opportunities for writing
· Captions – Your post captions are no longer captions. Think of them as potential blog posts or website product page descriptions doing the work for you
· Stories – Finally, yes, your stories will also show up in search results. Use them as real opportunities to reshare your content and get your message out repeatedly
Things to consider
Here are 3 tips that I recommend to help your Social SEO success:
1 Include Evergreen content
Evergreen content is topics that are timeless, therefore are likely to still be searched for in 6-12 months’ time rather than jumping on a short-term trend. [6]
Think about your service offerings, helpful advice and content that introduces you.
2 Avoid keyword stuffing
It’s something that tempts a lot of people, but please don’t stuff as many key words and phrases as possible into your content.
You only need 3-5 key words to really make an impact, so think about the problems your audience has and conduct research to find the most effective ways of describing their solution/s.
3 Remember accessibility, always
Something that sadly gets forgotten about, or not even considered at all in some cases, is optimising content to ensure that it is inclusive for those who may have visual, audial and/or physical impairments.
Taking the time to write descriptive alt text for screen readers, or to add closed captions onto your talking reels makes all of the difference in providing a richer experience through more context and description where it is needed.
Additionally, it makes you a more trustworthy source to Google and also meets current user behaviours – did you know that 92% of people* currently watch videos with the sound off? [7]
Summary
I hope you’ve found this useful in learning why and how to weave SEO into your social content. It’s time to get your posts performing with the same impact as your other platforms with minimal effort.
If you would like to have a chat about how I can help you work SEO into your content, click below to arrange a FREE 30 minute discovery call with me.