How to Boost Your Search Rankings With These Instagram Hacks

Source: Neil Patel

People either search for something or they don’t.

There’s not a whole lot you can do about it, to be honest.

For example, how often do you Google “Super Bowl”?

Not very often, right?

Probably just during the month of the event (and a week or two before).

Look up that same keyword in Google Trends, and you can quickly see that the same is true for pretty much everyone else in the world:

People do all of the same searches within a few weeks of an event. And then they almost never do those searches any other time of the year.

Obviously, it would be tough to grow a business off organic traffic alone when your primary keyword only gets attention seasonally.

Instead, the best keywords and brands pull in consistent attention.

Searches for those keywords might increase or decrease throughout the year if they’re related to a seasonal business, but otherwise, there needs to be consistent interest.

That’s often why you also end up competing for the same keywords in both organic and paid search with thousands (if not millions) of other competitors.

But what if there was another way?

What if you could create demand for a new search term and then dominate 100% of the market? (Because then no one else would be targeting it, too.)

I ran an experiment a few years ago that proved this is possible.

For example, the number of Google searches for my name increased by 71%.

Google searches for my name (or brand, in this case) increased dramatically (and continue to rise).

Traffic to my websites also increased during the same time.

And I was doing no classic SEO strategies or tricks to cause this bump.

Instead, I was using Instagram to drive this new awareness.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through the steps I used on Instagram to improve SEO (and show you how you can do the same), without worrying about one keyword or building a single link.

Step #1. Create a lifestyle brand

You might already know that Instagram’s 700 million users show better engagement than almost any other social network.

People love interacting, commenting, and sharing. It’s addictive!

But you might notice something interesting when you start digging into the specific posts (and accounts) that see the highest engagement on the platform.

And on Instagram, it’s lifestyle shots — hands down.

Nobody wants to see your product posted a million times. But put that product in a real-life scenario (or one that people wish they were in) and watch the comments roll in.

One of my favorite studies illustrates the difference.

1. Nike based 60% of posts on lifestyle shots.
2. But only 32% of Adidas’s posts included lifestyle-based images.

Why is that important? The average results showed that Nike had 8 times the engagement that Adidas did.

The takeaway from this study is pretty obvious, right?

Posting more lifestyle shots will get you more engagement on Instagram (almost overnight). While at the same time, if you do it right, it will help you build your brand visibility in the process.

Our goal with Instagram is to build brand awareness so that people go back to Google to search for who you are, what products you make, and why you’re so interesting.

Think of it like doing your own PR. You could pay a PR firm to plant stories about you in the press.

However, that’s not cheap. And there’s no guarantee it’s going to work, either.

So this approach makes it possible to create your own Halo effect with Instagram. You’ll get many of the same benefits for a fraction of the price.

People want to live vicariously through each other on Instagram. And fortunately, you don’t need over-the-top Ferrari pictures with mansions and models.

Instead, shoot for real (as in, realistic).

For example, take shots that make it look like people would want to be there with you. (Even if there’s, well, nobody there with you.)

There’s even some hard data behind why these posts excel on Instagram.

One study showed that images with faces bring in more attention than either products or scenery. And another study showed that ‘authenticity’ is the single biggest contributing factor to a ‘powerful visual’ today.

I’ll show you the perfect example of this.

Check out the latest few posts from comedian Kevin Hart.

Now, which of those do you think has the most engagement?

Go ahead and look again real fast, because I’m going to unveil the answer in just a second.

Let’s start with the obviously ‘staged,’ professional shots (especially the ones on the bottom row).

How did those fare?

The obvious ad-looking orange one in the bottom right, for example, only has 58.9k likes and 263 comments.

Those numbers are dreadful considering that he has over 53.6 million followers.

The trick is to look at your engagement ratio here. For example, how many likes, comments, or views are you seeing (on average) in comparison to your follower account?

A paltry 263 comments from over 50 million followers now seems pretty small, doesn’t it?

Now, let’s find out which of those other posts had the most engagement to see what we can learn.

There were a few candid shots of Kevin with his friends and family towards the top. Hovering over those reveals that one of them had over 460k likes and 4,369 comments.

That’s significantly better, and the photo just shows people just sitting around a table about to have lunch!

There’s nothing special happening. There are no Lambos in sight.

And yet it already crushed the event-promotion post we saw earlier.

However, this one with Kevin and his friends isn’t necessarily the top-performing post, either.

Instead, that honor goes to a simple video of Kevin and his wife dancing.

It got over 10 million views within a single day! Then it also received 23.7k comments (in one day).

These shots aren’t fancy. Instead, they’re the opposite. They’re a simple, unfiltered look into someone’s personal life, and the Instagram audience can’t get enough.

The easiest place to start hacking Instagram…

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