Your Instagram profile is becoming your second website. Are you ready?

If you work in SEO, you've probably started seeing this in the SERPs: carousels, Reels, Instagram posts ranking for competitive queries.
This is not anecdotal. Your Insta content strategy is now directly impacting your SEO strategy.

Concretely, what does that look like? A very simple example.

Take the query: "best coffee Montreal".

❗ Yesterday: Google would have shown you blog articles ("The 10 best coffees..."), lists (Narcity, MTL Blog), and Google Maps.

✳️ Today: In addition to all that, you now see a visual carousel of Instagram publications. A post from a food influencer, a coffee shop's account with a beautiful photo of its latte, a Reel showing the ambiance...

For the end user, it's often more direct, more authentic, and more engaging than a long article. For us, it's a new playground.

1-The keyword finally becomes king on Instagram.
The thing is, Google doesn't "look" at your beautiful photos (for now), it reads. It reads your bio, your captions, your hashtags, and the alternative text of your images (the famous "alt text"). A post with the caption "Our new flat white, roasted on-site in our Villeray café..." becomes a web page optimized for local SEO.

2-Your Insta grid is your new optimized mini-blog.
The lifespan of a post was 24 hours? That's over. A well-optimized post about a recipe, a tutorial, or a place can now become a source of "long-tail" traffic for months. Every post is a new chance to rank.

3- E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) also comes into play on Insta.
Google loves expertise and trust. A well-established Instagram account with an engaged community in a specific niche (vintage fashion, vegan cuisine...) sends very strong signals to Google. Your social authority becomes search authority.

The killer question: should we turn our Community Managers into SEO experts? Or the other way around? The line is becoming blurry.


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