Instagram’s more than 200 million professional Instagram accounts will now be searchable through Google, marking a major shift for travel brands and their marketing strategies.
Instagram’s new indexing feature means professional content that has traditionally been confined to the Instagram ecosystem – including photos, videos, carousels and reels – is now discoverable beyond the platform, enabling professional travel accounts to reach far wider audiences than before.
Industry research has found that, compared to other social media platforms, 71% of travel brands say Instagram delivers the most traffic and higher levels of engagement.
The hashtags #travel and #vacation are used more than 200 million times every month on Instagram.
For travel and tourism brands, their Instagram content will now be able to directly compete will traditionally indexed content, including news articles, blog posts and e-
“Visual Instagram content – which many travel brands today lead with – could now outrank traditional articles when they better match search intent, especially as Google’s evolving ranking systems increasingly favour engaging, multichannel content over static, keyword-heavy pages for certain terms,” said Claire Elsworth, Strategy Director at performance marketing agency Impression.
“Travel brands will now need to start optimising Instagram content in the same way they would a product page or landing page. That means developing social content with Search intent in mind, including writing captions, using alt text properly, and making sure hashtags reflect how people are looking for your products or category.”
“Brands will also need to review their past content and start treating Instagram with the same editorial discipline they apply to their websites. Ultimately, those travel brands that adopt an integrated Social-SEO strategy will be best placed to capitalise
on this shift,” she added.
Instagram’s professional accounts are comprised of either “business” or “creator” accounts, with over 90% of Instagram users following at least one professional profile.
The indexing feature will be enabled by default but can be opted out through user privacy settings.
Instagram isn’t the first social media site to make its posts discoverable on Google: content from TikTok has been visible since the early 2020s, while X (formerly Twitter) allowed Tweets to be indexed by Google in 2009.
