Instagram SEO: Do This Instead of Hashtags

0:00I'm going to be talking about Instagram SEO Instagram search engine optimization how do you get found on Instagram that's what I am talking about and let me let me start with a secret and this is a secret that they don't want you to know hashtags don't work actually I think the Instagram CEO has talked about that I've made an episode about that I've gotten like five or 10 million views making videos about that on Instagram and Tik Tok hashtags they mostly get pushed out to spam accounts who will it's what it is is they get pushed out to followers of the hashtag and a lot of the times

0:37these are spam accounts and so using hashtags gets you followers from either Bots or people who don't really engage and in the long run this hurts your account this was revealed in this massive thread on the Instagram marketing subreddit that hashtags actually hurt your account and when I saw this I immediately stopped using hashtags and this was after for my first year on Instagram I was posting using a thirdparty application and if you post using a third-party application on Instagram then your posts they get suppressed in reach so basically anything that uses a shared IP address like a VPN or a thirdparty posting application those posts if you post

1:23under a VPN if you post lots of VPN not all but lots of VPN and if you post with a third party application very very very high chance your posts will be suppressed and reach this happened for me and this happened for all of my friends so then we all started posting manually through the Instagram mobile app and that we we were getting immediately just immediately way way way more reach 10x 100x thousand times more reach sometimes 10,000 when we would have we would go viral just so much more and actually I might think I'm at 126,000 followers on Instagram right now if for that first year it was around

1:58like 10 months for if for those first 10 months I wasn't using a third- party automation tool to post my videos cuz it was my videos coming out from Tik Tok to Instagram with no watermark by the way it was just the third party tool if I hadn't been using that I would probably be at 500,000 followers maybe even a million followers on Instagram I just didn't know that but anyway so after I figured this out post manually and I was posting manually for around I think 6 months or something and I had gone viral a bunch of times I saw this post about hashtags and I stopped using hashtags

2:37and there was no difference in performance my videos went just as viral and I'm growing pretty fast right now just posting one time a day with videos that don't take me very long to make I'm growing by several thousand followers each week so do you need to use hashtags to get found on Instagram no you do not but this is what you should do and it's actually really simple if you are making videos where you speak in the videos here is what you do you take your video audio without music you have it transcribed and you use that transcript as your description and you don't use

3:13hashtags and if there is a specific keyword that you want to Target you put that keyword at the beginning of the description on Instagram and hopefully your video is related to that keyword and so you're going to have all this relevant language in your a script because you're talking about this topic which is related to that keyword and so then you have all this relevant language in your description because it came came from your script it came from your transcript so now you have your keyword at the beginning of this the description right at the beginning of the first sentence of the description you have your keyword there and then you have

3:51this whole long description which is really just your transcript ripped from your video used as your description now what I do is I read through the transcript and I edit it to make it more usable for a description so for example if in the video I'm saying look at this this is crazy I'll actually write it in the description what is act what is crazy so and that doesn't really take much time it's just a few tweaks here and there when editing the transcript for the description but that's it's so simple it's don't use hashtags you don't need them and put your keyword at the beginning of your description

4:30if you want to use more relevant keywords ones that have high semantic relevancy then you can put those into the description as well if you want to just insert them into your script but you don't have to custom write a long description yourself because you can just take it from whatever you're saying in your video now what if you're not doing a video or you don't really have speaking in your video here is what you do you write it it's really easy still you take your whatever keyword you're interested in and you can by the way you can Target the same keyword tons of times with multiple videos but you take

5:05your keyword you put it at the beginning of your description and then you write about that keyword you if if it's like a guide if it's a how-to you would just write that and it doesn't even have to be a lot of words the Instagram description length is actually pretty short it's 2200 characters and I can't tell you that's the Instagram caption limit I can't tell you how many times I've I've had descriptions maybe for videos that were 2 and 1/2 minutes and I posted the transcript from that 2 and 1/2 minute video and it was more than 2200 characters and then I had to edit

5:38it down so it's really easy to write a description and you write different descriptions for each post even if you're targeting the same keyword and then what it comes down to is engagement if your piece of content is engaging then there's a very high chance that that's what people are going to see when they search the keyword and even if it's not engaging if your keyword is nich enough there's still a very high likelihood people are going to see your content for the keyword if it is Niche enough so let's come at this from the point of the Instagram algorithm what does the Instagram algorithm actually

6:10want to see it wants to see shares it wants to see saves it wants to see comments so you make a video with a strong hook negative hooks always do better if you say this is going to be great instead of saying that say this is going to suck and you can still spin the video and make it positive but this is going to suck typically performs way better than this is going to be great if it's a long video spread hooks throughout it and then if it's just an image post try to make it really good of course and try to make it something that

6:37people are going to share because it's interesting or cool or useful some something that people are going to share and something that people are going to comment on but share is people the Instagram algorithm really loves when people share it also helps if your profile is relevant to the content if you are posting it's like um it's the same in SEO in Normal search engine optimization actually if you are a crypto site this is this is too dramatic of an example I don't want to I I want to do something okay if you're a hardware site if you are a website about hardware and then you post a Killer

7:13article about your microbiome about how to improve the bacteria in your gut but you're a hardware site and then you post this article about how to improve the bacteria in your gut unless that article goes wildly viral there's a high likely choice like high likelihood it will never rank for anything and so you want to have an Instagram profile that is related to what you are talking about in my case I talk about digital marketing and everything that I share is about digital marketing I'm not sharing stuff about health I'm not sharing stuff about the best altcoins to buy or the best meme coins to buy sharing stuff about

7:51digital marketing and so it's important to have a bio that's relevant to your topic and for the rest of the content on their profile to be relevant if you want to go after a different Niche probably better to create a new account for that Niche or pivot your existing account to that Niche and you can do that but it requires consistently posting in that new Niche but it's generally a best practice to have one account per Niche now it's possible that I will change my niche in the future maybe instead of just having a digital marketing account in a couple years I'll just make my account about myself about Edward stur

8:27and that would be more relevant because my account is Edward Sturm people know me as Edward Sturm and maybe I'll just share things that I'm interested in but at that point people are interested in me so it's not really like I am going after a new Niche it's more that just my top of Mind awareness increases and my recognizability increases so then I can go after these things but if you have for example if you have like a faceless if you have that a faceless Hardware account and then all of a sudden you're talking about you're making videos or or image posts about your microbiome and

9:03trying to rank for keywords on Instagram about your microbiome it's going to be very difficult what content should you post should you post reals or images typically reals are best they're the best for growth it's like a hack it's a crazy hack for growth posts work too image posts work too especially if they have writing if there's writing in the image post that works as well I've actually seen a lot of people adapting viral posts on Twitter on X and then just you and I'm sure you've seen this too and using the screenshots of the X posts on Instagram and those work really well but then what you do is instead of

9:39just doing a one sentence caption you take the entire all the writing that you are sharing you take that and you put it in the description because now these posts with the writing in the images it's also in the C in the caption so it's searchable and by the way Instagram videos often appear on Google as well and if you want to increase your engagement it's a good practice generally just try to reply to commenters try to actually build a community even if you're a faceless account good practice to reply to commenters I'm quickly going to share how I make videos really fast because I've gotten super efficient at it I

10:19recently posted dript on my computer it was a few days ago and I'm like I'm on to day 775 posting reals and Tik toks every day in a row 700 at 75 days and I posted a screenshot of my editing software descript and I've talked about this a lot before but before I was using descript I was making all my videos in the Tik Tok app and if you want to make a video in 5 seconds no I okay that's an exaggeration if you want to make a video in a minute do it in the Tik Tok app I have made viral videos in one minute in

10:51the Tik Tok app I am not exaggerating it's so intuitive it's so easy and they give you captions right there and that's it and so you can just make a video really fast you don't need any special editing software you can take the Audio I think you can copy the captions that Tik Tok generates and then you can use that as a description and if you can't copy it from Tik Tok then you can also take your video download it without the watermark if you you can just Google download Tik Tok video without the watermark and then there's free transcription software and you can just have your audio from the video

11:27transcribed you make the edits and then you repost manually without the Tik Tok Watermark onto Instagram now what I do is I make my video in this app called descript so I will just speak for a couple of minutes either with a script or without a script and then descript removes the gaps between words automatically so it just flows it's snappy snappy cuts it removes retakes with one click it's just a remove retake option I can green screen myself I can have automatic eye contact if I'm reading from a script I did that yesterday the images and the videos that I put into my video they snap to the

12:05cuts that are automatically made with descript when it's removing gaps between words it's so easy to make content like this and so I'll make that video oh and you edit in the transcript instead of the timeline so it's like editing in the word in a Word document and then you just take that transcript is what I do I take my transcript I copy it and then I use it for the description I just copy it directly from descript I find a keyword put that keyword at the beginning of the description take the rest of the transcript use that as a description and that is what I do it's

12:36really easy to make content now you make content really really fast you make videos really really really fast even if you want to do a faceless account it's just so easy to post at least once a day on social media I have a guide my exact social media posting strategy I'll link to it in the description for this episode it's just everything that I do how I post on every platform but it's really easy to post every day to grow an audience and to rank on Instagram to do Instagram SEO so that is my Instagram SEO guide that is how you get discovered on Instagram using search and this is

13:14episode 528 of my daily digital marketing podcast fun fact the idea for this episode came from the YouTube inspiration tab the new YouTube inspiration tab which I talked about on yesterday's episode because because I wasn't feeling the idea that I was going to do today I wasn't feeling it and I'm like okay what am I going to do today so I started brainstorming with this new YouTube inspiration Tab and then I saw oh Instagram SEO that's something that a lot of people are interested in and literally the YouTube inspiration tab told me that and it gave me an outline and it gave me things to riff off of and

13:50that's what I did this was great so anyway thank you so much for watching if you're watching on YouTube if you're listening on Spotify or apple podcast thank you so much for listening 5 28 days in a row doing this podcast I will talk to you again tomorrow bye now