Instagram’s posts on Google highlight the ever-increasing importance of brand

Google announced earlier this week that Instagram posts from public, professional accounts will now be shown on their SERPs, highlighting not just the increase in social search, but the consideration for SEO everywhere.

But, what does this mean for brands?

• It’s another way of gaining organic traffic to your content – except instead of to your site, it’s to Instagram
• If your posts are tagged with specific locations, then it means you could appear in the SERPs for relevant local searches

There’s been a real shift towards the importance of brand over the last few months, with social content featuring on Google, product recommendations via ChatGPT and other LLMs, and Google’s AI Mode announcement highlighting a hyper-personalised focus on search, with only brands users interact with appearing in searches (in theory).

If you want to be found organically as a whole, ultimately, you need to grow your brand presence; and that’s by creating a cohesive content strategy that spans on-site and across social platforms, whilst ensuring your brand’s look and feel remains consistent.

How to optimise your Instagram posts for search

When it comes to ranking on Instagram and other social channels, the fundamentals of SEO stay the same:

• Conduct keyword research: keywordtool.io gives monthly searches for hashtags on Instagram, as well as search volumes for the likes of TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest and more. And, with Ahrefs highlighting SERP features within their keyword research tool, it’ll probably only be a matter of time until they start highlighting the keywords that bring back Instagram posts and videos on Google specifically, too.
• Optimise your posts for those keyword research: That means including your focus keyword in the caption, and using those hashtags.
• Create content for users, not search: With the increase of content created by AI, it’s never been more important to keep your customers at the heart of everything you do – creating content across each channel for your audience and not what you think algorithms want to see, will be key to building your brand presence in the long term.

How to get your Instagram content seen by a wider audience

As for organic social, it’s another significant change for brands running Instagram channels. This move should further remind creators that you’re no longer just serving posts to your follower base; combining this with AI recommendations in feeds means you should now start optimising your content to be seen by a wider audience to ensure you continue to grow.

To keep getting your content served by a bigger audience, consider:

• Your hooks: Is your content starting strong enough? If it’s not posing a significant problem to a viewer or capturing their attention, Instagram will realise – and your post will be served to less people.
• How you spot trends: Trends aren’t just silly dances and lip sync videos you see on TikTok. Trends can include emerging topics and debates, so ensure you’re spotting these early so you can create content whilst it’s hot.
• Being timeless: Social platforms often serve content from up to two months ago. Don’t date your posts around seasons or cultural events – make sure that someone can watch or read your post in two months’ time and it’s still in date.

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed with the constant updates around the way people are searching, and the need to be everywhere; but we’re here to help! If you want to chat around how we can help you with your social or content strategies, then get in touch with us today.