Your Instagram SEO guide for 2025
If you’re looking for more views, reach or follower growth on Instagram, you should be considering search as a traffic source.
In this guide, I’ll be sharing the basics around how you can optimise your content for search, as well as quick and easy ways to get started.
In case you haven’t come across the term SEO before, I’ll fill you in:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which - in catchier terms, is when you prioritise how well either your website, posts or your channel is ranking within search.
For years it was thought of as a “Google thing”, because 1) Google is bloody huge and it’s by far the biggest search engine out there and 2) there are a particular type of marketers (SEO specialists) who are experts in helping a website/web page rank really bloody well.
This particular article is about Instagram SEO though, aka - how your posts are ranking within Instagram itself.
Why is SEO important on Instagram?
I’m sure one of your priority goals on Instagram is to increase your discoverability (whether that’s through post reach or follower growth) and Instagram SEO can help you do that.
If you’re ranking well on Explore (where the search feature is) under high traffic terms like “restaurants in London” or “winter outfits”, it’ll help more people find you.
We’ve also seen how important search is becoming on TikTok over the last two years. This article from Adobe has some great insights, for example - over 2 in 5 Americans have used TikTok as a search engine. Now we know that TikTok also runs search ads on their platform like Google too, it’s about bloody time we started taking it seriously.
For context, I have a small-ish TikTok account with 4000 followers and I get a minimum of 500,000 search views a month, usually closer to 750,000 per month. So the potential with this = huge.
Because of this, it’s only a matter of time until Instagram catches up. After all, Instagram wants to keep you on their platform for as long as possible (let’s not forget that!).
So, what should you be prioritising to rank well on Instagram?
These are the five areas I encourage my creator and business clients to look closely at with their Instagram content.
I’ve coined the term “CATCH” to remind them of the five key areas (it’s easier to remember!)
C - captions (if you are posting a reel and you have a voiceover on that content or you’re talking straight to the camera…. those!)
A - alt text - which you can add to photo posts. (As a mini heads up, alt text - which is short for "alternative text", is a written description that tells Instagram what your post is about)
T - text on screen - like titles and hooks on your reel or photo post (as long as you use Instagram’s own font so Instagram can read what you’re saying)
C - captions below your post
H - hashtags (yep, hashtags are keywords too!)
Start adding ‘CATCH’ into your Instagram strategy and as search optimisation becomes more important on Instagram, you’ll be in a great place!
If you’d like to build an Instagram strategy with me - we can have a look at search for you too, you can find out more just here.