Your public photos and videos may soon appear in search engine results.
From July 10, 2025, search engines will automatically be allowed to show all photos and videos on result pages.
This means that more people could discover content from your professional account outside of Instagram.
It was like Instagram wrote this notification directly for me.
For the past year I’ve been obsessing over Instagram and social results in search engine results pages.
From one year ago:
In fact, Instagram is now the 4th most clicked domain on Google, up from 6 last year.
Reels being in search results, I knew and was already actively exploiting… but photos too?
Think about all the pure text carousels on IG, pitching fitness supplements or somebody’s new business book.
THAT COULD BE YOUR BRAND!
What do many IG creators do?
They use a caption like “Comment ‘BOOK’ to get the book.”
This is completely wrong.
What should they do?
Lead the caption with a relevant target keyword. Then post the full carousel text as the rest of the description.
Same with Reels. Caption = keyword + Reel transcript / detailed description.
AND Instagram’s CEO recently said in an interview they’re working on improving in-app search, which notably is awful.
So…
Target people looking to buy what you sell and reach them FOR FREE on organic Google search and organic Instagram search.
What to do
While this may soon turn on by default, make sure you have it on anyway.
Go to Settings and activity > Account privacy > Toggle on Allow public photos and videos to appear in search engine results.
You may also have to have a professional account, for example a creator account.
How to find keywords to target - your site
I posted this last night and it’s already up to 75,000 views on IG and 170,000 on TikTok:
Here’s what to do:
- Go to Google Search Console – this is Google’s own tool for accessing their search index. Connect your site to it if you haven’t already.
- Go to Performance, then Search Results.
- Go to Add Filter, then Query.
- Click Regex.
- Paste this in:
^(who|what|where|when|why|how|was|did|do|is|are|aren’t|won’t|does|if)[” “] - Hit Apply.
- Now you can see all the informational searches your site shows on Google for. Informational searches use who, what, where, when, why, how, etc.
- If you replace that with this:
^(buy|order|purchase|get|best price|cheap|discount|deal|promo|offer|sale|where to buy|how much|cost of|price of)[” “] - Now you can see the e-commerce searches your site shows in Google for.
- Take the keywords you’re already ranking for:
- Place them directly in your content or higher on your pages/posts to rank better for them.
- Use the keywords for Instagram content ideas and rank on Google and in Instagram search for them.
How to find keywords to target - competitors
I just made this podcast about this:
It allowed me and a friend to find an under-targeted $15,000/month keyword in five minutes.
- Use any major SEO tool – Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.
- Pick somebody in your industry who’s ranking for thousands of keywords – too many to sort through manually.
- Export the keywords.
- Put the keyword list into Google Sheets.
- Use this formula: =AI(“Write Yes or No – Does this relate directly to [insert your granular niche]”,A2)
- A2 = the keyword that’s being analyzed by Google Sheets free native AI.
- What’s in quotations is your prompt for the AI.
So let’s say you provide marketing services for plumbers. You find an agency that shows on Google for thousands of searches related to home services – not just plumbing. You would use this to isolate only the keywords that are related to plumbing.
Bam! More keywords and content ideas.
Use this to get customers, users, and warm leads
If you like these tips, I’m telling you – what’s included in my 13.5 hour SEO course, Compact Keywords, will blow your mind.
Shoutout to Angel who sent me this a few days ago (this is Angel’s site for anybody who’d like to see):
To learn more – watch the explainer video at the top of https://edwardsturm.com/compact-keywords/
