The need for a comprehensive social media presence is paramount. Brands that effectively utilize social media can reach many new customers and audiences without having to spend copious amounts of time building a technical foundation. Still, many brands are discovering that a combination of active social media and SEO can produce even better results in terms of traffic and leads.

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in existence, yet many brands’ accounts and posts are not visible in prominent search results. How can this be rectified? Continue reading to find out how you can get your posts and pages to rank in search.

Optimize Your Name

While it’s not common for Instagram posts and accounts to rank prominently in most SERPs, it is not impossible. One of the first optimizations you absolutely need to do is reconfigure your user name to reflect the most dominant keyword for which you want to rank. By pinging search engines with this keyword, your chances of ranking increase substantially. We highly recommend that you keep any keyword inclusion in your name to one keyword only: keyword stuffing is not a good idea.

Fill Out Your Bio

Your Instagram bio is a perfect place in which to optimize your account for SEO potential. While you have a bit more freedom here with regard to keyword inclusion, this bio section should strive to describe in detail exactly what your brand tends to cover. Some ideas for inclusion in this section include other Instagram accounts or social media platforms you own, meaningful tags and quick descriptions. Do keep in mind that you’ll only be able to fit a couple of dozen words in this section, however.

Ensure Profile Is Public

It’s impossible for your Instagram posts and page to be pinging search engines if its visibility is set to private. Within Instagram’s settings, you can toggle the account privacy option to ensure it is being read and seen by search engines and the public at-large. For those looking to generate clicks and be visible in search results, ensuring that your content is publicly visible is obviously required.

Build Links to Your Posts

Most Instagram links are not treated as real links by search engines, which is why you see so few of them in search results. However, you can build links to specific Instagram posts by directly linking to them from other social media networks and websites. Simply fetch the dedicated URL for the post(s) in question, link to them from elsewhere, and these links will be treated like any other standard link when indexed by search engines. The more instances in which the specific link is indexed, the better the chances are that it’ll rank prominently.

Despite Instagram’s widespread popularity, it has a minimal presence in search results. For maximum effect, be sure to activate public visibilty, strategically use keywords in your name and bio, and build links to your Instagram posts from other websites. By implementing and repeating this strategy, your Instagram account will begin ranking for the SERPs you target – and you’ll build a stronger following in the process.