It’s #HonestyHour: when was the last time you actually searched hashtags on Instagram? Maybe once or twice in 2020? We thought so.

While some SMMs may forever ride or die for hashtags, we made the decision last quarter to reduce them on all of our agency + clients’ Instagram posts to focus more of our efforts on search engine optimization instead. Here’s why… 👇

WHAT INSTAGRAM SAYS, GOES

In September of 2022, the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, took to his Instagram Stories to share that adding the full 30 Instagram hashtags to your post “doesn’t actually help you reach more people.” 🤯

Not only will it not help you achieve additional distribution, but the official Instagram Creators account also explicitly advised against using too many hashtags on Instagram posts. So, how many hashtags should you use on Instagram? For best practice, the platform advises users to keep the number of hashtags on their posts between three and five.

To increase the likelihood of your post showing up in search results on Instagram, be sure to place the hashtags and relevant keywords in the post’s caption and not as a comment.

THE DATA DOESN’T LIE

If advice from the social platform itself isn’t enough reason to update your Instagram hashtag + SEO strategy, then take a look at this report by Socialinsider. The company analyzed over 75 million Instagram posts published between March 2021 and March 2022 to see whether or not hashtags played a role in post views and engagement.

The results revealed that Instagram hashtags do not significantly increase engagement. Backing both Mosseri and the Instagram Creators account’s claims, the highest average engagement rate by impressions was generated by posts with 3-4 hashtags. At Homemade Social, our 2022 Social Media Analytics Report Reveal further supports this study as most of our top engaging content from the year was published in Q4 once hashtags were reduced.

So where does SEO tie into all of this? When discussing the evolution of search at a recent conference, Senior Vice President of Google Knowledge and Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, shared that about 40% of young people, when searching for information, no longer turn to Google Maps or Search – they go to TikTok or Instagram.

To optimize your content for search engines, start by finding keywords that your audience is actually searching for. Use the social platform’s search bar to type in a base keyword and discover other keywords in the predictive text’s drop-down list. To show up as one of the top results for these search queries, you’ll want to start incorporating these keywords into your content as much as possible without keyword stuffing.

We hope you found this blog post helpful on how to optimize your Instagram hashtag + SEO strategy in 2023. For more tips, be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to Hashtags on Instagram and subscribe to our social media newsletter. Chat soon!

xx,

The Homies