How to rank Instagram Posts in Google - James Dooley Interviews Jesper Nissen

James Dooley: How to rank Instagram URLs in Google Search. Today I am joined with Jesper Nissen, who has been growing a large following because of his strategies with ranking different social media platforms. Today’s podcast is about how to rank Instagram posts in Google. Jesper Nissen: Last year, Meta changed their indexing rules for Instagram. That is something you should be aware of. If you post to Instagram, your Instagram profile will be crawled, and in most cases it will also be indexed by Google without you having to do anything. So that is just something to keep in mind. Jesper Nissen: These Instagram posts rank relatively well. Not as well as Facebook and X, but they do rank relatively well for long-tail keywords, especially if you are doing local SEO. What you need to do is have an Instagram account and then just start posting. Jesper Nissen: When you have posted on Instagram and you click publish, you get presented with a pop-up. I am talking about from the browser. I am not using my phone to post. Then you get the pop-up with done, and you can click on your post and see the URL for that post. That URL is what you grab, and then you send it to the indexer. In my case, that is Prime Indexer, which I created. You can choose anything, but if you want it to index and rank, you do need to make sure that Google actually crawls it. So you send it to the indexer, and within a couple of minutes or a couple of hours, it appears in Google. Jesper Nissen: When it comes to Instagram, you can post text about your business, your services, your products or your personal brand. You can also insert links, but with Instagram, the links will not be clickable. I am not sure if they are going to change that. When you have a Facebook company page, you have a link and it is clickable, at least for now. But with Instagram, that is not how it works. So you cannot use it for traffic from the Instagram post. Of course, people who find you on Google can see the link and copy it, but they will not be able to click it. Jesper Nissen: What you do is make sure the first seven to 12 words of the Instagram post are your target keyword because those words will be used as the SEO title. Otherwise, it is just good to go. Post, publish and then send it to the indexer. James Dooley: On Instagram, Instagram is more media-based, so it is videos, images and things like that. Is it the first seven to 12 words that matter the most, or does the image matter? Could it literally just be a blank image, with the first seven to 12 words of the text becoming the most important part? Are you doing long-form statuses, or are you doing something almost like a tweet, where you ask the question in short form and directly answer it underneath? Jesper Nissen: That is actually a good question. You have given me an idea now because we do know that Google reads the text on images. Of course, I always post something to my branded social media accounts, including Instagram, with something that matters. I never post blank images just to post. Normally, most of the time when I do post, it is just a screenshot. I grab something because that is the fastest. I save it as a JPEG because when you save an image as JPEG, you can have more EXIF data, and I use that to optimise my images. Jesper Nissen: I actually had not thought about whether it matters that you post readable text on the image. That might be a benefit. James Dooley: The reason I asked that is because recently we have become obsessed with reputation online. I want to try to improve reviews, testimonials, awards and case studies. What we have been doing, mainly with reviews and case studies, is when someone leaves us a five-star review on Google Business Profile or Trustpilot, we take that review text and put it into an image with our branding. Then we post it on Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms, and we also put the text directly underneath it. James Dooley: So we are repurposing that same review and putting it on multiple platforms because it says how great we are. What I found very interesting, specifically on Instagram, was that the images for the testimonials and reviews started to rank really well. I was wondering whether Google was reading the text inside the image. I am talking about ranking in Google Images here, but we have now filled Google Images with loads of positive five-star reviews that look great. Previously, our brand plus reviews or brand plus testimonials in the image tab did not really have anything. Now it has all these nice reviews being presented. I feel like, as part of query fan-out and building reputation, would that also help rank the Instagram post for what you are writing at the top as well? Jesper Nissen: Yes, for sure. What I normally use my Instagram posts for is to rank in Google organic search for long-tail keywords. I was not talking about image search, but when you talk about image search, of course, Instagram images are one of the best social media assets to rank in image search. Yes, that would definitely matter. That is a good idea. I am going to note that. James Dooley: Keep us posted on how it goes because, from the image point of view, I think it could be great. But let us move on to rankings within web search. The first seven to 12 words matter the most, so make certain you get your target keyword in the first seven to 12 words. You are getting the Instagram post URL and loading it into Prime Indexer to try to get Googlebot to crawl it as fast as possible. Are you doing any likes, hearts or comments on there, or is there anything else you are doing? Jesper Nissen: No. I find Instagram is different compared with X, Facebook and LinkedIn. On Instagram, I find it a little bit more difficult to grow my brand. I do not know if it is because I am doing SEO, but I do not get much interaction. I do not get many clicks, likes or comments on my Instagram posts. I still post, but they still rank, so it does not seem to matter if you get interaction. James Dooley: Right. So the comments and likes do not matter. What about the power of the Instagram post? How many followers the profile has? Does that matter? Jesper Nissen: It does not matter. I have almost no followers. I have around 80 on Instagram or something like that. So it does not matter at all. James Dooley: Sounds good. Anyone who is watching this, I hope you liked the video on how to rank Instagram posts in Google Search. Make sure you check out the links in the description because there are several other videos where I ask Jesper Nissen questions about how to rank tweets in Google, how to rank LinkedIn posts in Google and how to rank Facebook posts inside Google. Jesper Nissen, if anyone is watching this, what is the best way for someone to reach out to you for consultancy or to hire you? Jesper Nissen: They can find me on X, Facebook and LinkedIn, and my website jespernissen.com. James Dooley: It has been an absolute pleasure. Cheers, Jesper Nissen. I hope you liked the video on how to rank Instagram posts inside Google Search.