Your Instagram posts can appear in Google now: Yay or nay?

Hi! 👋

Let's see what it means for creators that Instagram posts are now indexable by search engines like Google.

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This is Petra from ​The Creators' Diary​. If this is your first TC’D newsletter, welcome! We’re happy you’ve subscribed!

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Story of the week 🗞️

Instagram posts ​can now appear​ on Google search result pages, but a few conditions must be met first:

• You have to have a business or creator account (personal accounts are excluded).
• The account and the posts' visibility have to be set to public.
• The posts (including photos, videos, carousels, and reels) have to be search-optimised, with the captions using keywords that will trigger the search engine to show them for related search queries. The other text-based parts of your profile, like your bio, should be optimised this way, too. But, the stories and highlights are excluded from this update—for now.

What does this mean for your creator business?

Considering the above conditions are true:

1. The visibility of your posts and creator business can grow.
2. Your Instagram page and other platforms you link to from there could see more traffic than before.
3. You might get more sales as your products will be seen by more people, and therefore, potential customers.

This is where traditional search and social search are finally meeting. Before, we had people searching on Google, and we had people searching on Instagram. But they've never seen the same results. Now, there will be an overlap.

Make your Instagram content search engine-friendly

If you want your Instagram posts to be indexable by Google and enjoy the above-mentioned business benefits:

1. Set your account and posts to public.
   
2. Use relevant keywords in your bio and posts.
   
   👉 Think about what keywords you'd like to appear for. If it's product-related, how is your ideal customer likely to think of what you make before making a purchase? Would "cute ceramics" work as a keyword? Think of their shopping mindset and situation, too. When would they need what you make? What would trigger a purchase? Mother's Day? Christmas? How about keywords like "ceramics for moms" or "Grinch ceramics"?
   
3. Use hashtags as keywords, but don't put too much emphasis on that. It's more useful to weave your keywords into the caption than the hashtags, so if you want to be efficient, focus on your bio and captions.
   
4. You can add alt-text to your Instagram images, where you can also use keywords, giving more juice to search engines to feed on.
   
5. Adding a location to posts can be useful too, especially if you want to advertise yourself as a local artist, e.g., when you have works exhibited somewhere or you offer art classes in a studio people can visit, etc.
   
6. This last step is optional because I know creators are short on time, but I'm sharing it for the sake of the full story. Your old posts (posted after January 1, 2020) will become searchable now, too, so you have the chance to go back and optimise those as well by editing the captions and adding keywords, at least for posts that seem more crucial. Like for your evergreen products that you sell continuously, or services that you offer on an ongoing basis (like commissions).

🔴 Important note:

I already see creators worrying over this last bit that Google search will show their outdated posts, with products that are not available anymore, or links that don't work anymore, leading them to actually lose sales.

Don't overthink this.

If somebody likes what they see, they will check your profile and your fresh posts. They may even contact you to ask if there's a chance for that old collection or something similar to it to be back, or if they can commission you to make something like what you did in the past.

If you're still worried, you can actually go back and update all your old posts (which, if you post a lot, I don't recommend because that sounds unnecessarily tedious; so I'd opt for editing selected ones) or you can pin a new post to the top of your profile for a while, letting new visitors know where they can find your current things or when some of your past works, themes or collections will return, if they came from an old post.

Creator quote of the week 📌

Artist ​Anne Bender​ shared her thoughts on how this Instagram-Google news can benefit creators:

See you next week,

Petra

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