Instagram is a powerful visual platform for digital marketers to take advantage of. Naturally, anybody taking part in a multichannel marketing strategy understands that efforts to market your Instagram profile should extend beyond Instagram itself.
Surprisingly, however, Instagram accounts are actually notoriously difficult to index and display in the search results.
This is because most Instagram users are, in fact, not so interested in promoting themselves, and in fact Instagram actually blocks search engines[1] from indexing your Instagram images. The profiles themselves can still be indexed, but the images are not.
This represents a major hurdle for marketers hoping to get additional traffic to their Instagram account from the search results, but the hurdle is not insurmountable.
Let’s talk about how to optimize your Instagram account for search engines.
Make sure your profile is set to public
Instagram profiles are set to public by default, meaning that anybody can access your profile and all of your content. As a marketer, this is obviously how you want it. However, it’s a good idea to double check that your privacy settings were never altered and ensure that this hasn’t been changed.
To do this[2], go to your profile and click the hamburger menu icon:
Next go to “Settings” followed by “Account Privacy” and make sure that the “Private Account” toggle is set to “off.”
Set up social profile schema for Instagram
Google allows you to use schema.org markup to tell them which social media profiles are yours. If your brand gets a card in the Knowledge Graph, your social media profiles will then show up there:
Have your developer take a look at Google’s documentation[3]