Instagram Indexing: How To Get Noticed

What has changed is this: Instagram now lets search engines index public content from professional accounts (business and creator).

If you weren’t already using social media to inform your content strategy, you’re behind. Instagram is now officially part of the discovery ecosystem. It always was, but now it’s playing in the big leagues alongside Google.

Instagram can index your content if you:

• Have a public professional account (business or creator)
• Publish content like posts, carousels, or reels (unfortunately not your stories)

We know search isn’t linear. There are over 150 touchpoints that users take when searching, whether that’s asking a friend, searching on Google, looking at YouTube/TikTok reviews, checking influencer recommendations on Instagram, and more. Looking at Instagram specifically, there are over 2 billion monthly active users, which is a big audience to get your products or services in front of. 

A 2025 eMarketer report found that among Gen Z, 30.4% identify Instagram (and 23.2% TikTok) as their top source for product discovery, while Google trailed behind at 18.8%

Translation: Google is listening to users and adapting to the content and content sources they’re looking for.  Through indexing, your content could reach not only the people doomscrolling Insta at 2 am but also the ones Googling away who’ve never opened the app.

Just because Instagram now indexes content doesn’t mean your content shouldn’t have been optimised before now. Your content strategy should consider all touchpoints to make sure the user journey is as clear and concise as possible. 

Think like a blog post H1. Your first line is your title. It must contain your primary keyword and a strong hook to stop the scroll. Use the rest of the caption to answer the query, just like you would in a blog post. 

Make sure your hook and key terms that summarise the contents subject are in the first two lines to avoid the ‘read more’ cut. Still ,make sure you keep it within your brand tone of voice, with the keywords woven in naturally. 

Keep it snappy. You can summarise your content in smaller captions than you think. Don’t try to go overboard; it’s not your dissertation. 

Example:

Bad: OOTD 😎 🔥

Good: Three ways to style a trench coat you’ll actually wear 🔥

🍸 Office chic trench coat look – sharp tailoring, neutral layers

☕️ Weekend brunch trench coat outfit – casual knits, denim, trainers

🍹 Friday night trench coat style – sleek all-black, heels, statement bag

Alt text is primarily used as an accessibility feature, helping users with screen readers, but it’s also great for SEO value. Search engines use the text to understand the image and it’s relation to the content, whilst accessibility helps to improve overall user experience and engagement, which helps to boost search visibility. But you need to BE DESCRIPTIVE. 

Example:

Bad: Woman smiling 

Good: Young woman with shoulder-length dark hair walking along a cobbled London street. She’s wearing a navy wool belted trench-style winter coat over a cream roll-neck jumper, paired with knee-high black leather boots and carrying a structured black tote bag.

Yes, you’re face talking to the camera could become indexed and searchable on Google. 

You need to make sure that it’s accessible to as many people as possible – a good user experience is only going to help. Plus, you want those keywords not only through your captions, but with subtitles to help the Google bots understand what your video is all about.

If your posts are landing pages, your profile serves as the homepage. Make sure users (and Google) go onto your profile and know exactly what product/service you provide. Do this through relevant keywords in your display name and bio, with up-to-date and relevant links. The image should also speak to what your brand does. You don’t want Google to leave your profile as confused as they were when they got onto it. 

Your Instagram keyword plan must align with your main SEO strategy. Here’s how it works:

You can find a seed keyword using SEO tools such as Ahrefs. Make sure you cross-reference this by typing the seed word into Instagram search and looking at autocomplete suggestions. This is literally Instagram telling you what people are looking for. 

Yes, you want your content to be optimised, but keyword stuffing is not the way to do it. No one wants to read, ‘winter coat outfits,’ five times within one caption. 

Stay away from making things messy or too simple. Your alt text needs to be detailed, but your post themes should be highly targeted. Use carousels if you need to cover multiple angles, but keeping a post subject focused means that you can generate a more thorough analysis on what’s working for your brand, and what needs work.

One thing is for sure: you should stop treating SEO and social as two separate brand identities. They’re not. Your keyword lists, content pillars, and campaign calendars need to talk to each other.

Your strategy must follow a multi-platform approach. This doesn’t mean posting the same thing everywhere, but instead adapting one core story to work natively on each platform. The win is in a connected content strategy where your on-site category pages, blog, TikTok, and your Instagram posts all work together, aligned to keyword demand, to help win all aspects of search.

Instagram indexing isn’t a quick and easy solution to completely change your position in the SERPs. Still, it is a new strategy you can undertake to promote your native content within Google. 

Optimise your posts, keep your profile sharp, and let the search engine do the heavy lifting in extending your search. 

You never know – I might see your dancefloor selfies AND you’re Instagram reel on Google.