Filter In New Clients – The SEO Benefits of Instagram
March 12th, 2015 by
As a business, it’s important to connect with potential customers in as many ways as possible. You maintain your website, attend networking events, and post regularly on Facebook, but could you be doing more? Enter: Instagram.
As of December 2014, there are 300 million monthly active users on Instagram and over 75 million daily users, which offers great potential to broaden your brand’s reach. You’re probably familiar with some of the benefits for adding your businesses on Instagram: it’s a visual medium, there’s potential for marketing contests, it has interesting filters, and the list goes on. But did you know there are also SEO benefits
Increased Social Activity
The debate rages on over the correlation between social presence and higher search engine rankings. Search engines deny a relationship, but the data overwhelmingly suggests that increased social activity for specific webpages means higher rankings. No matter which side you believe, I think we can all agree that positive branding and increased online presence isn’t a bad thing.
Optimized Profiles
On Instagram, you can create an optimized profile for your business with a clickable link back to your site, which contributes to your overall link profile. Additionally, Instagram is both searchable and indexed by search engines, contributing to your business’s overall real estate for a branded search.
Although images aren’t indexed directly through Instagram, there are third-party sites that utilize their API and make the images indexable by search engines, which furthers your business’s potential to appear in image searches. Some popular web viewers are Websta, Gramfeed, and Followgram.
Keeping Posts Relevant
Regardless of whether your potential customers are viewing your Instagram photos through a computer or mobile device, it’s very important to align your business with the interests of your target demographic. A basic guideline to follow is the rule of threes: ⅓ promotional posts, ⅓ informational posts, and ⅓ engagement posts.
What might that look like on Instagram?
Let’s say you are a fitness company. Your promotional post might be a photo of your company’s new running shorts right out of the box as they’re hitting the shelves. An informational post could be a photo of a healthy lunch that encourages your followers to eat well. You might also post a scenic landscape of a morning run with a fantastic filter to engage with your followers.
Using #hashtags
All posts should include #hashtags to increase the likelihood of your content being liked and shared. You can also enable sharing permissions that automatically post to other social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, whenever you share on Instagram. By seeding your content to additional social networks, it has the potential to be picked up and shared by even more people in the social space.
Mobile Benefits
Since many users access Instagram on a mobile device, there are additional SEO benefits that are more unique to the platform.
Even though Instagram doesn’t currently offer clickable links on individual posts, you’re still encouraging followers to interact with your business through mobile devices. Since Instagram users are often looking at your posts on a mobile device, they’re more likely to visit your business’s website on their mobile device as well.
Websites that are optimized for mobile perform better in search engine results because Google looks at a website’s mobile capabilities as part of their algorithm. By encouraging users to visit your mobile site by interacting with them on Instagram, you’re helping your overall SEO efforts.
As you can see, there are more reasons for your business to be on Instagram than the awesome filters. This platform enables you to boost your SEO efforts while also connecting with your target demographic and increasing your brand’s reach.
Sources:
http://www.litony.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Instagram-for-Business.jpg
http://blog.instagram.com/post/104847837897/141210-300million
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/12/5203578/instagram-now-has-150-million-active-monthly-users
https://instagram.com/starbucks/
https://help.instagram.com/147542625391305
https://instagram.com/nikerunning/
https://help.instagram.com/365696916849749
