Instagram keywords are something relatably new, a brand-new approach that helps your content rank higher on the platform. However, you still shouldn’t forget about the immortal hashtags, which haven’t lost their power and are still extremely useful in increasing your organic reach and making your posts more visible on the platform!
How to use hashtags and keywords at the same time? And why is it worth doing? In this mini guide, we will explain why these both methods show their full power only when they co-exist together.
Keywords and Phrases on Instagram
Instagram keywords are recognized by the algorithms, and that way, Instagram can instantly classify our content and show it to users interested in our niche, and our topics. These keywords help new users discover content on the platform based on the text included in our description (caption) under the publication.
This is a smart solution that helps to specify the topic of the posts that interest us. Then, users browsing through Instagram can easily find only content that represents what they’re looking for!
The downside of this solution is the fact that the creator of the post must consciously describe the topic and the elements of the post, e.g. a red dress in the content of the post, which is a challenge at times, as it doesn’t always match the content that is shared in the caption, and we don’t feel the need to mention such details in our captions. For example, when there is an influencer in a red dress in the picture, who holds a tray of cake in her hands, and a recipe for that particular cake is in the caption of the publication, the information about the red dress won’t be important or add anything significant to the caption.
What’s interesting: SEO on Instagram doesn’t differ much from what we know from web search engines, including Google.
In the case of Google search engine, it’s not really welcome to attach keywords at the end of the content and it can be treated as an unfair practice, which leads to limiting the visibility of the content, and even the entire page.
Is it the same with Instagram keywords? We encourage you to use keywords consciously and use our suggested keywords to build full sentences that sound natural, instead of attaching them as a separate part of the caption at the end of it.
However, this means that you won’t be able to describe all the elements of the post or the picture/photo with keywords so that they are included in the sentence. Look, you won’t be able to use them all to build fully logical sentences, which is why hashtags come to the rescue here!
Hashtags on Instagram
Hashtags categorize similar posts in one place and create a ranking of the best posts for a given topic, while they don’t have to be a “sounding naturally” part of the caption itself.
Hashtags complement your captions and help you mark what you couldn’t describe in the caption of the post, for example, information about the red dress of the girl in the picture, which you can indicate with the hashtag #reddress.
What’s more, posts on hashtags’ explore pages have a very long lifespan, especially if you manage to achieve TOP positions under them. This means that your content can be visible to people who want to familiarize themselves with the results on the page of the selected hashtag!
Another important information is the fact that after entering the keyword in the search engine you will see both content described by the phrase and content that exists only under such a hashtag, for example:
When typing in the search term ‘red dress’, you will see posts that contain the phrase red dress in their content, but also those that have been marked only with the hashtag #reddress.
This means that keywords and hashtags serve different purposes, but at the same time, they complement each other very well and allow your content to be not only well described for the search engine but also clear and pleasant to discover by your followers.
