Instagram and SEO in 2026 (and whether hashtags are still worth it)

Instagram posts show up in Google search now! Does that mean hashtags still matter? Let’s dig in! This bite-sized episode is your guide to Instagram SEO in 2026.

Instagram’s algorithm is smarter than ever and your content is being indexed, analyzed, and ranked in ways that simply didn’t exist a year ago. The rules have changed. Has your strategy?

In This Episode:

• How to improve the Instagram SEO for your small business (and the big bio SEO mistake clever copywriters are making)
• The most important way to optimize your Instagram bio for SEO — based on which parts of your bio are actually “searchable”
• The types of questions to start answering in your content to help your Instagram content come up in a Google search
• Whether hashtags are dead as an SEO signal in 2026
• How Instagram SEO and traditional Google SEO overlap 

The Instagram SEO Basics You Can’t Skip

We break down the Instagram SEO fundamentals: what it actually means for your account to be “search-optimized,” how the platform’s algorithm reads your content, and why Instagram SEO strategy in 2026 is no longer optional for business accounts. 

🎉 Get clients from Instagram! Tap here to work with Jenna Harding  inside Magic Marketing Machine!

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✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

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Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding (00:00)
Someone slid into my comment section on Instagram yesterday and said the most beautiful words. I found this post through a Google search. Ooh, it's delicious. It's working.

posts are officially showing up in Google. Instagram SEO is alive and well. Let's talk about how you can get more eyeballs coming to your account in some unconventional ways using Instagram SEO. Firstly, are hashtags dead?

they are dust. They are cold. They are rotting away underground. Instagram recently, I mean, okay, there's some nuance here. Let me explain. Instagram recently announced that you can only have a maximum of five hashtags on your post and it'll actually give you a little alert if you try and post more than that. They're just not the most important thing anymore. Think of hashtags as

the titles of chapters in a book, You used to add them to your post to tell Instagram, hey, Instagram, this is what this post is about. It's about all of these topics seen here in the hashtags. It's about hashtag women-owned business. It's about hashtag Instagram SEO. It's about hashtag.

how to show up in search. now Instagram is getting smarter and smarter and they don't necessarily need those tags to tell them what's going on in the post. They know what's going on in the post. They know because of what you're saying, they know because of what you're writing, they probably even know because of the discourse that's happening back and forth in the comment section.

You might not have noticed this, I don't think it's on every account yet, but when I look at my comments on Instagram, often a little blue magnifying glass appears with a suggested search, and it's Instagram trying to guess what my post is about, and I gotta be honest, it's often wrong. Sometimes it's right, but often it's wrong. It is an indicator of where the app is going. It's getting smarter.

When you think of a search engine, you probably think of Google. That's probably the first one that comes to mind, right? Pinterest is also a search engine. YouTube is also a search engine. Instagram is also a search engine. You can search for topics. You can search for people. You can search for answers. platforms, we have to remember...

billions of people use them because I always hear this argument in my head of, yeah, but I never type in Instagram, Nike shoes, 2026, but everybody's using these platforms differently. There's billions of users. So for other people, Instagram might be the very first place they go. I go to Instagram when I'm going to hire a service provider. I want to look at your account. I want to look at your content. I want to hear you speak and

riff on your expertise. And I believe a service provider knows what they're doing better when I can hear them talk confidently about their work. So if I go to your page and I just see you reading from a teleprompter or all I see are B-roll reels or short like one-liners or inspiration, I don't trust you as much as if I had heard you actually talk about what you do. And I trust you more if I see social proof. These are all things we build into a content strategy, right?

It's not the topic of today.

the point is everyone uses platforms differently. people are using Instagram like a search bar, right, for different things, different topics. But also now someone can go to Google and they can type their question in Google. And if you have an Instagram post that answers that question they ask Google, your

Content as an answer. this is what occurred for me yesterday Instagram moved the button where they keep your scheduled posts you make scheduled post and then you can get it in your settings and they move the button and I figured some people are probably gonna be stressed about that because I was stressed about that because I thought the button that I needed disappeared so I made a post that was like don't freak out

Instagram didn't remove your scheduled posts, they just moved the button

Jenna Warriner (04:03)
Because I figured people would be looking for that answer, would be searching for the answer to that question, I made a reel that answered that question and then Google picked it up and when people started asking Google that question, it's now sending them my answer, my post.

Jenna Harding (04:20)
So how do you take advantage of this? The same way you would if you were optimizing your website for SEO. And guess what? Next week on the show, I have an SEO expert coming in to talk to you, and he is so brilliant. I learned so much from our conversation, I can't wait to share it with you. So that's next week on Shiny New Clients, an episode all about SEO for small businesses. So one of the things you're gonna look for is what questions are people asking? What questions are your ideal clients

typing into Google that you can answer for them. And the first thing that comes to your mind is probably going to be whatever people pay you for. And yeah, you can think about what people pay you for. Like my clients would ask, how do I get clients from Instagram? And I would be like, great, come work with me. I will help you get clients from Instagram. But there's also smaller questions that then, when people ask Google these smaller bite-sized questions, like maybe you might ask, what ring light should I be using for Instagram?

Or how do I share social proof on Instagram? So all of these smaller questions that I can answer ideal client to your website and then gets them into your web. And then once they're there, they get an opt-in or they maybe buy a mini offer or they book a call to talk to we're not just talking about attracting people for your big main, here's how to work with me topics, but little ones too, to bring them into your world.

And when you are answering these very crystal clear questions, start your video with a hook that reiterates the question. And I would go so far as to in the caption of your post, say the question again.

Instagram's not looking at your hashtags anymore. It's listening to you. It's reading your captions. looking at the actual content. So if your people are

for high protein breakfast ideas, you want your caption to very clearly say, five high protein breakfast ideas. If you're ideal clients.

are asking, how do I make my reactive dog calm down? You want your caption to say, here's exactly how you make your reactive dog calm down. Or I used to ask myself, how do I make my reactive dog calm down? And now I've discovered this strategy that I explained to you in the video. You know what I'm saying? You want to repeat their questions back to them so that Google can see that you are answering them.

You want to use the words they're using when they ask these questions so that Google goes, okay, I have an answer. I found a post that answers your question here.

another place you can harness SEO on Instagram, your name line. you've got your handle, right? So mine is at JennasPaige that's my handle. And then I have my name line, Jenna Harding, marketing coach. A lot of times on that name line, people put made up things. maybe it's a title that you call yourself or a silly title.

But what you should put there is what people are searching when you are in your business is the answer.

you can totally make up a title of what you call yourself, that's fine. but in these locations that search engines are scraping, you wanna make sure to be using the words your clients are using. If your clients would call you a dietician, don't put food wizard. If your clients would call you,

A dog trainer, don't put dog whisperer that, specifically in that name line on Instagram.

This is exciting, because we also have been seeing, this is anecdotal. mean, all of this is anecdotal because we don't exactly know what's going on yet. All of this is really just rolling out.

We do know that this change where Instagram just came out in July of 2025. have to have a business account a creator account, and you have to be over 18, and your account has to be set to public. And I don't even think it's for every account. It's just like that's when this initiative started.

So it's not that old, we don't know a ton about it. But when things happen, like somebody says to me, Jenna, I found your through a Google search, that is a sign that this is happening.

And I don't think AI can quite do this the same way Google can, but I do know chat will sometimes give you a YouTube video that answers a specific question that you've asked. that's pretty similar because YouTube is also social media. I think it's reasonable to guess that we could get to the place.

where if somebody asks chat GPT a question and you have an Instagram post that answers it, it could end up sending people there. Not yet though, not quite.

but maybe one day. as I was saying, anecdotally, posts have been living longer. I've been seeing on my account, we used to say that an Instagram post would last like 72 hours a week if you're lucky. I've been seeing posts last a long time. in my notifications, if I ever see so-and-so followed you from your reel,

I try and make a habit of always tapping just to like remind myself which of my Reels and my Reel series are the ones that bring in the most followers. And I notice people are coming in off old content, old being, you know, weeks or months ago, which is not how the app used to work.

but we're seeing posts lasting a longer time and now people are able to find your content from new places, which is such a move in the right direction. If you've been using Instagram to grow your business, if it's your primary lead generating platform, the top of your funnels like it is mine, it is a good time to be a business on Instagram.

If you think this stuff is fun, want to learn a little bit more about it, next week's episode, like I said, is going to be all about SEO, and I brought in an expert who knows more than I do. If you want to start getting clients from Instagram, join Magic Marketing Machine. Come on in. I'll show you how to.

grow your following, get more views, get more engagements, and most importantly, get more clients, perfect paying clients who you love to work with because your messaging was so good. It attracted these people that are wonderful and light you up whose life you get to change and who you get to help.

I really love my job.

That's all for now. I'll see you in the next one.