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 surrounding how you 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.

Jesper Nissen: That is just something to keep in mind. 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.

Jesper Nissen: What you need to do is, of course, have an Instagram account and then just start posting. When you have posted on Instagram and you click publish, you get presented with a pop-up. I am talking about posting from the browser. I am not using my phone to post.

Jesper Nissen: Then you get the pop-up with done, and then 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, 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, what you can actually post in there is 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, because when you have a Facebook company page, you have a link and it is clickable, at least for now.

Jesper Nissen: But on Instagram, that is not how it works. You cannot use it for traffic from the Instagram post. Of course, people that find you on Google can actually see this link and copy it, but they will not be able to click it. What you do is insert the first seven to 12 words of the Instagram post, because they will be used as the SEO title. You just need to make sure that your target keyword is inserted there. Otherwise, it is good to go. Just post, publish and then send it.

James Dooley: On Instagram, Instagram is more media-based. It is videos, images and things like that. Is it the first seven to 12 words that matter the most, or the image? Does the image not really matter? Could it literally just be a blank image and then the first seven to 12 words of the text become the most important part? Are you doing long-form statuses, or are you looking to do something short-form, almost like a tweet, where you ask the question and directly answer it underneath?

Jesper Nissen: That is actually a good question. You have actually given me an idea now, because we do know that Google reads the text on images. So, 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.

Jesper Nissen: Normally, most of the time when I do post, it is just a screenshot. I grab something because that is the fastest. Save as, save it as JPEG, because when you save an image as JPEG, you can have more active data and I use that to optimise my images. But I actually did not think about whether it matters that you post readable text on the image. That might actually be a benefit.

James Dooley: The reason I asked that is because recently what we have been doing is we have become obsessed with reputation online. I want to be trying to improve reviews, testimonials, awards and case studies.

James Dooley: What we have been doing is mainly around reviews and case studies. When someone goes and leaves us a five-star review on Google Business Profile or Trustpilot, we get that text from the review and put it into an image with our branding, then post it on Instagram and LinkedIn. Then we put the text directly underneath it as well.

James Dooley: We are regurgitating, rehashing and repurposing that same review and putting it on multiple platforms because they are saying 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.

James Dooley: I was wondering whether it was reading the text inside the image. I am talking here about ranking in Google Images, 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 posts 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 are talking about image search, of course, Instagram images are one of the best social media assets to rank in image search. So yes, that would definitely matter. That is a good idea. I am going to note that.

James Dooley: Yes. Keep us posted on how it goes, because from the image point of view, I think it could be great. Let us move on to the rankings within web search. The first seven to 12 words matter the most. So make sure you are getting that 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 that you are doing on that?

Jesper Nissen: No. I find that Instagram is different when it comes to 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 the likes do not matter. What about the power of the Instagram post? How many followers they have, does that matter or not?

Jesper Nissen: It does not matter. I almost have no followers. I have about 80 on Instagram or something like that, so it does not matter at all.

James Dooley: Sounds good. Anyone 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.

James Dooley: Jesper Nissen, if anyone is watching this, what is the best way for someone to reach out to you for consultancy or anything else if they want to hire you?

Jesper Nissen: They can find me on X, Facebook and LinkedIn, and my website, jespernissen.com.

James Dooley: Well, it has been an absolute pleasure. Cheers, Jesper Nissen. I hope you liked the video on how to rank Instagram posts inside Google Search.