While marketers are still wrapping their heads around GEO and AI overviews, Meta released another curveball by announcing that all content coming from Business and Creator accounts on Instagram will now be searchable globally. Instagram content from brands and creators with public accounts can now be indexed by Google Search, which means that search results may now include Instagram posts alongside website content, news and video. While this has already been the case in some regions since 2020, as of July 10, Instagram has started gradually allowing public content to be indexed by search engines on a global scale – including here in the UK.
So, what does this actually mean?
In short: wherever you are in the world, and whoever you’re marketing to, keywords now matter on Instagram just as much as the visuals. Once the roll-out is completed, Google (and Bing) will crawl and index public posts from all professional accounts, meaning that any creative, captions and hashtags could appear directly in search results. This update won’t impact Stories or posts marked as private.Why does this matter?
Instagram content appearing in global search results means that more users could discover a brand before visiting the website. But this has already been happening for some time: in fact, analysis from SEOZoom suggests that Instagram content has already been competing with traditional web pages in search rankings in the top 10 search placements in regions like Italy. So if social search hasn’t been a top priority to date, now is the time to start focusing on it. In B2B land, Instagram is often a hub for all things employer brand, given the visual and less corporate nature of the platform. Now, branded Instagram accounts will need to align with websites, company LinkedIn pages and other marketing touchpoints to give users consistency across channels, no matter how they discover a brand. And as mentioned above, keywords will be increasingly important to help users discover your content. Captions are now searchable text that Google can index and rank, and alt text can be used as discoverable metadata for image content. The first line of Instagram captions before the “See more” kicks in will now act as the primary headline in search results. As Instagram still doesn’t allow links in post captions, brands will need to demonstrate expertise within the caption and the creative, so consider formats like carousels and Reels to provide a breakdown of existing web content such as case studies or a company USP. We mustn’t forget about Bing, either. While it could be considered the ‘ugly duckling’ of the search world, everyone’s favourite AI helper ChatGPT uses Bing’s search index as one of its LLM sources. This means that Instagram posts could also find their way into ChatGPT answers.What do marketers need to do next?
Content planning will be more crucial than ever, as marketers now need to consider search intent for Google (typically for specific information or to purchase something) vs. Instagram (scrolling for inspiration and entertainment). It’s a good time to consider optimizing any company Instagram profiles to be more search-friendly. This means adding clear, keyword-rich language to the bio section and updating or reposting any relevant evergreen content with more keywords in the caption and alt text. And while hashtags have been slowly becoming a social pariah, they will now become searchable elements from Instagram content. Conducting some research into hashtags that fit a particular business niche will be important to making this a success. When it comes to measuring the impact of Instagram on Google, there are a few areas to monitor as part of this shift:- Instagram’s ‘Insights’ function measures search traffic under ‘External sources’, offering data on user demographics from search referrals
- Google Search Console will also begin showing Instagram content performance data for branded searches and relevant keywords
- Native Instagram metrics such as follower growth and engagement should be mapped against Google keyword rankings and traffic sources to see if there’s a correlation
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