Instagram SEO made easy: Expert tips + a free tool for success

With over 2 billion monthly active users, Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms with a built-in search engine. And these days, users aren’t just scrolling their feeds — they’re actively searching for brands, products, and content using keywords, hashtags, and even the Explore page.

This is where Instagram SEO comes in. By optimizing your content for search, you can increase your visibility, engagement, and followers.

But where do you start, and what actually works in 2025? To find out, we interviewed several social media experts who have mastered the art of Instagram SEO. They shared what to do and not to do to appear in Instagram’s search results. Keep reading on for their tried-and-true tips.

What is Instagram SEO, and why is it important?

Instagram SEO is the practice of tailoring your Instagram content to achieve maximum discovery in search results on the platform. Instagram search results can include relevant content, accounts, audio, hashtags, places, and Reels.

When a user enters keywords related to your business in the Instagram search box, you want your account or content to appear at the top. And following search engine optimization best practices for Instagram can help you achieve this.

To illustrate the importance of social media SEO, Hootsuite ran an experiment comparing optimized and non-optimized Instagram posts. The main takeaway: SEO-optimized posts can earn 30% more engagement.

Here’s a list of the ways Instagram SEO tactics can benefit you:

• Increase discoverability: Optimizing your content for search helps it appear in Instagram search results, Explore feeds, and suggested posts. Moreover, Google indexes Instagram posts, so any SEO tactics you apply can give you a massive opportunity for extra reach.
• Grow your audience organically: More reach means more potential engagement, followers, and customers without paying for ads.
• Win favor with the algorithm: As Instagram continues to improve its search features, SEO-friendly content is more likely to rank higher and be favored by Meta’s algorithms.
• Boost long-term reach: While most feed posts experience ephemeral results, well-optimized content can continue attracting views and engagement anytime users search for it.
• Gain a competitive edge: Creating search-optimized content can help you stand out from and perform better over time against competitors in your niche.

Free Instagram SEO tool

Looking to boost your Instagram SEO strategy? Hootsuite’s free Instagram SEO tool can help you increase your visibility, engagement, and followers on the platform.

Using the tool below, you can create SEO-optimized captions for your Instagram posts that will help get them in front of the right audience.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Select the style (aka tone) of your caption. Choose from casual, dry, formal, fun, helpful, inspirational, and other categories.
2. Choose the language you’d like your caption to be in. The tool currently supports writing Instagram captions in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German.
3. Add a short description of your post. You can include the post type (Story, Reel, carousel, etc.) and what the post contains. You can use a maximum of 200 words to describe your post.
4. Add any relevant keywords that you want included in your caption.
5. Finally, click Generate caption to get your SEO-optimized caption! Be sure to check the caption for accuracy and brand voice before posting.

4 Instagram SEO ranking factors

According to Instagram, four SEO ranking factors help determine what and how content is shown in search results:

1. Search text: Instagram considers the text users type in the search bar to be the most important factor. Based on the search terms, Instagram looks for relevant usernames, bios, captions, hashtags, and locations.
2. User activity: Instagram considers users’ activities on the platform, including accounts followed, hashtag interactions, and posts viewed. Search results will show accounts and hashtags a user has interacted with higher than other results.
3. Popularity signals: After prioritizing the above two signals, Instagram will rank results based on their popularity, based on total clicks, likes, shares, and follows.
4. Publish date: Instagram tends to show more recent posts in search results.

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A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

In this Reel, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri explains how to ensure your content gets recommended on Instagram in 2025.

One more thing: Your content must follow Instagram’s Recommendation Guidelines to appear in search results, and your account can’t violate any Community Guidelines.

In this search, some accounts rank higher because I follow mutual accounts. If you search the same phrase, your results would look different from mine. Give it a try!

How to do Instagram SEO in 3 steps

If you’re new to SEO, here are three easy steps to get started with optimizing your content on Instagram.

1. Understand your target audience

Before you can tailor your content to appear in the right searches, you need to understand your target audience’s mindset.

Some questions to ask yourself or your team:

• What are your customers’ pain points?
• What words do customers naturally use when searching for solutions to problems that your business solves?
• What do customers search before looking for buyable solutions to those problems?

Pro tip: You can use social listening tools such as Hootsuite to discover your audience’s preferences, common questions, and frustrations.

Within Hootsuite, you can generate a word cloud to identify related words to add to captions and hashtags.

2. Conduct keyword and hashtag research

Once you’ve answered the questions in step one, you’ll have some good starting points to kick off your keyword research.

This research aims to narrow down the phrases, words, and relevant hashtags for your business that your audience uses when searching for things related to your business.

Here are some tools that you can use to do keyword research:

• Google Analytics: See which keywords are driving traffic to your website
• Google Trends: Discover trending and rising searches to inspire new content and related keywords to test in your Instagram posts
• Hootsuite Social Listening: Use the word cloud feature to uncover common words used in relation to your brand, industry, or hashtags
• Instagram search bar: Type a word in the search bar to discover suggested tags that you can add as keywords or hashtags

3. Add keywords to your content

After step two, you should have a good list of keywords and phrases to integrate into your content. We suggest grouping them by theme, product, or whatever makes sense for your business so that you have separate groups of keywords to test and rotate through.

You can add keywords to your content in a few ways:

• As titles: For audios and locations
• In captions: Woven naturally into the post copy
• As hashtags: Added to the caption (placement doesn’t matter)
• As alt text: In the text used to describe visuals in your post

Note that currently, only captions are searchable, so you should add any SEO keywords and hashtags in your post caption, not comments.

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