Instagram SEO: since last July your posts can show up in Google too

Instagram SEO used to mean one thing: being found in the app's own search. Since the tenth of July last year it means something else as well. Instagram announced that public content from business and creator accounts is made available to Google and other search engines automatically, so posts, carousels, reels and captions can appear in ordinary search results.

For a shop whose only shop window is a page, that is a new door, and most sellers have not noticed it opened.

The conditions attached

• The account has to be professional, business or creator. Personal accounts are not indexed.
• It has to be public. A private page is out of this entirely.
• The declared age on the account has to be eighteen or over.
• Public content only. Stories and DMs go nowhere.

Where to switch it off

In Instagram's settings, under privacy, there is an option along the lines of allowing public photos and videos to appear in search engine results. Turning it off takes a second. For a seller there is almost no reason to: if your content is public, anyone on Instagram already sees it. Indexing only adds another route to it.

What Instagram reads when somebody searches

The name field is the most expensive empty space you own

The name field is the bold line under your profile picture, and it is not the username. It carries real weight in search, and nearly every shop leaves it holding the brand name alone. A brand name only finds people who already know you, and those people are not the ones you need.

1. 1Write down the words a customer types: evening coat, specialty coffee, sewing supplies.
2. 2Make the field brand name plus that phrase, a few words at most.
3. 3Add your city if you sell locally.
4. 4Then leave it alone for a month; churning this field works against you.

The rest of the profile, bio, links and highlights, is covered in the Instagram shop bio.

Alt text takes thirty seconds and nobody writes it

When you publish, advanced settings carry a field for describing the image. Its real job is accessibility for blind users, but search engines and Instagram read it too. Leave it empty and Instagram writes its own guess, which usually comes out as something like a picture of a person.

Written properly it is a real sentence: cream linen coat with long sleeves, worn, against a brick wall. Not a row of keywords, which helps neither a blind reader nor a search engine.

What Instagram SEO does not do for you

Being indexed means Google is allowed to see the post, not that you will rank. On competitive phrases an Instagram post almost never outranks a real product page. Where you have a chance is the long and specific: an exact model name, an unusual combination, your own brand. Hashtags do nothing here either, for the reasons counted out in the Instagram algorithm.

And Instagram product tagging is unavailable in many countries, so search sends people to a post, never to a checkout. The path to a purchase still runs through your bio and your DMs, which is what selling on Instagram with no website is about.

Twenty minutes tomorrow morning

Confirm the account is professional and public. Rewrite the name field. Then open your last ten posts and write real alt text for each, which works on already published posts. Finally read the first line of each caption: if it starts with hello everyone, put the subject there instead. For new content, carousel or reels says where to start.