Add Text to Instagram Photos - Why You Need alt text and SEO for Instagram

by2playpolls

167 followers

4 years ago

Today is my "free" day, in the sense that I decided not to write content but to check how things are going. So I was just messing around and checking the elements of my IG page and I realized something. Since some months, social media marketing experts were talking about the fact that single images and videos were reaching more exposure than carousels, and they were telling this basing their assumptions on data. But the reason why they were telling this was not so obvious: if you have more followers than anyone else because this is your business, your exposure can be negatively affected for more than on ereason, and if you are an influencer you have the same exposure if your followers are genuinely following you. Moreover, no one knows Instagram algorithm.

But today maybe I found the answer to my question.

I opened my IG profile online - not using the app - and I started exploring the source code of my photos (you can do that just by clicking Ctrl+Shift+I). While I was analyzing the alt text of the images and videos, something called my attention: for carousels, the alt text corresponds to the title (more precisely, to what you include between <h1> tags when you are creating your image) of the first image, while the alt text of single images and videos corresponds to the whole caption. Mistery solved.

Now, even if Instagram tells us that search engines are not authorized to index our photos, there are a lot of Instagram viewers out there that will make your content indexed (you can simply go to the "Images" section of Google Search and type the name of your account to see that your images appear anyway).

All this to say that you should pay attention to SEO when you write captions, and you should pay attention to alt text on Instagram photos: images are among the best sources of traffic, because we know that when we type something on search engines we can access content even through images. And as marketers we should take care of them.

If you want to know how to add text to Instagram photos, the answer depends on the tool you use to publish your post:

• If you use Facebook Creator Studio, you will find the advanced setting right under the post info: there, you will be able to add alt text - that is, the description of your image;
• If you use the IG app, you will find the advanced settings in the same page where you add the caption;
• If you want to post a carousel, I guess you will use some kind of graphic tool to create it: be sure to include your keywords rich text between <h1> tags.

Hope you will find this useful to increase your traffic. Have a nice day!