From 10th July 2025 all public content from professional (business and creator) Instagram accounts will become indexable and searchable via search engines. Whilst users can opt-out, why would you? This is a development that can really get your multi-channel marketing strategy working even harder for you, with photos, reels, carousels and videos all appearing in search results beyond Instagram.
Optimising Instagram for search
Social search is becoming the norm, as is the prioritised presentation of multimedia results. If you’ve not previously invested time into optimising Instagram content with relevant keywords, hashtags and alt text, now is the time as it will impact your search visibility. Write captions considering keywords, themes and high-intent queries and ensure that assets align with your brand, message and overarching brand story. Instagram’s no longer simply an engagement tool, it’s a key component of your SEO strategy. Therefore when you’re creating content, make sure that it’s led by the themes your audience are interested in, addresses the questions they’re asking and includes relevant key search terms.
Optimising Instagram as a landing page
As a result of this development, your businesses’ Instagram posts are essentially becoming mini-landing pages. So the question becomes, if someone were to discover your brand via a Google search and land on an Instagram post, would it represent the brand well? And if they delve deeper into our profile, what will they find? Are we set up for Insta-success?
Brand x Performance
This development also embodies the symbiotic nature of brand and performance, whereby our brand needs to be performant in its every execution. We need to serve both social engagement and search discovery objectives with each piece of content. Instagram performance data will be displayed on Google Search Console, but will need to be correlated with Instagram’s native analytics to get a full 360 view of brand and performance efficacy.
This move brings businesses digital channels even closer together, meaning that consistency has never been more key, nor has having a relevant but connected strategy for content distribution. And where once there were channels for engagement and channels for search, content now needs to be universally optimised for both.
“This move is really exciting as it pushes the narrative that we’ve been championing for years, which is to break down the silos and start joining your content, social and SEO strategies together. With videos from Instagram being surfaced in search results the competition is going to get fiercer for click-throughs to your written content. Work together, repurpose content and start making waves in as many places as possible to really dominate the SERPs”.
James Roach, Head of Content & PR
If your business is late to the game or not currently optimising use of Instagram, now is probably a good time to start. And if you lack a joined up content strategy, now is the time to lock that down.
If you’d like advice on how to devise and deliver a joined-up content strategy, or how to optimise an Instagram account for your business, let’s talk. We’re also happy to audit your content and provide a guide to both improve it retrospectively and create posts moving forward in a way that creates strategic future value.