So you just started growing on Instagram, or you’ve been on a platform for a while, but whatever you do and what advice you follow, your account seems to be dead. First of all, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy that will work for every individual or business on Instagram, but you can boost your chances for growth if you optimize the most important elements of your profile.
There’s no better way to discover, and fix the holes in your Instagram action plan, than auditing your profile, so in this article, I’ll share with you an audit checklist that will help you recognize areas of your Instagram page that need optimization. Ready to improve your Instagram performance? All right then… Let’s dive in!
How are you supposed to know what areas of your account need optimization? We’ll Scooby Doo that thing. In other words, you’ll audit your profile.
What an Instagram Audit Is? Why Do You Need an Instagram Audit?
An Instagram audit is an investigation process (don’t worry, it only sounds super serious, but it really is not!). It helps you find your profile’s weak points and evaluate if it’s moving in the right direction. It helps you analyze different components that make up your profile and content strategy to determine what updates and modifications need to be made in order to grow quicker. It’s the most optimal way of increasing the effectiveness of your Instagram presence! Instagram audit is an absolute necessity and something every serious Instagram user should do every 3-4 months.
Now when you know what’s an Instagram audit and why you need it, let’s go ahead and jump right into our checklist.
What Steps to Include in an Instagram Audit. Instagram Audit Checklist
Instagram is a long-term game that can definitely lead to your views going up, so it’s really worth it to audit it carefully. What steps should your audit include?
- Are you using an Instagram business account?
- Is your Instagram handle consistent with your other social media handles?
- Analysis of your Instagram goals
- Review of every single element of your Instagram account: username, BIO, link in the BIO, display name, profile picture
- Content strategy review
- Hashtag review and hashtag research
- Audience review
The Best Place To Start Is Going Back to Your Instagram Goals
- What were they initially?
- Did you start your Instagram profile to boost your sales, build brand awareness or generate newsletter leads?
Look at them very carefully and ask yourself: does my Instagram profile achieve my objectives? If the answer is no, make a note of the areas that need improvement.
The easiest way to recognize what areas of your profile aren’t delivering results is to look into several KPIs. KPI, known as Key Performance Indicator, is just a fancy marketing term for indicators of your progress towards a particular goal.
For example: if your goal is to generate more website traffic through Instagram- your KPI would be the number of clicks your website gets in your Stories and Bio.
So if you see that there’s not much traffic coming to your website from your Instagram profile, you’ll look for any holes in your communication strategy and your profile optimization causing this problem. The next step will be to check what doesn’t work on the surface and…
Review All the Core Elements of Your Instagram Profile
Like your username, display name, profile photo, a profile description, action buttons, highlights, and overall profile aesthetic These elements are very important for two reasons.
- One, they are the first thing people see in your profile, and most of your visitors will decide to follow your account based on the quality of the information included in each section
- And two, Optimizing each of these elements will help you improve your chances of being discovered by users searching keywords related to your niche. In other words, your profile will be SEO-friendly.
This is what you should pay attention to rank higher in Instagram Search results:
- your @ handle, display name, and bio description should include keywords, so terms people use to find your business. For example, if you’re a wedding florist, you could incorporate the keyword ‚florist’ in your @handle, then add a long-tail keyword in your display name like ‚wedding florist & stylist.’ And finally, make sure your bio description says what you do and whom you do it for with keywords like ‚Timeless wedding floral designs for the modern romantics’.
If you optimize these three elements, your account will appear much higher in the search results. I’ve used the search term wedding florist to show you that the top results are profiles that included keywords in the @handle and display name, or just in the display name if they use a business name for their @handle. so you can see for yourself that it works. If your profile isn’t getting much traffic, this may be the part of the audit you should focus on the most.
These were the SEO elements of your bio; now, let’s review the ones that will wow your visitors and make them follow you:
- the first thing that people see is your profile photo – if you’re a business, it will be your logo; if you run a personal brand, it should be your headshot. It needs to be good quality, big enough to be seen on mobile, and match your overall branding. If your photo is of terrible quality, it may be pushing people away.
- Next, again, your bio – it needs to include keywords, but it also needs to sound human, show your personality, tell people why they should follow you, and what makes you different from other profiles in your niche. If you want your Instagram to drive traffic to your website, it also needs to include a link and a call to action. If you’re missing any of these elements, it may mean that your visitors need more clues on what to do in your profile.
- Make sure also to review your highlights – they can be a great extension for your bio with essential information about your business or your personal brand, and a fantastic eye-catcher! So if they don’t have cohesive covers that align with your brand’s visual identity and include some random insignificant stories that don’t help your audience at all, you’re not optimizing this section enough.
- and, finally, make sure that you’re maintaining a consistent aesthetic throughout your Instagram feed. If your grid looks like complete chaos, your audience may not be interested in connecting with a profile without a visual identity.
Once you’ve identified any errors on the surface of your Instagram page, it’s time to dig a bit deeper and…
Look Into the Quality of Your Content
If your content doesn’t resonate with your target audience, meaning it doesn’t spark much engagement, support your goals or reach many people, these could be the reasons why:
- Number one is that you have no content strategy that supports your objectives – your audience should understand what you have to offer just from one look at your recent posts. They won’t scroll through your entire feed to get to know you, so you should ensure that your posts tell a consistent story and carry the main message you want people to hear and act on.
Another thing you should look into is the quality of your content and captions. Sadly, if your photos, videos, and graphics are of poor quality, the text is invisible, the image doesn’t correspond with the caption at all, your content is probably confusing and not appealing to your audience. Same goes for captions – if they don’t address your audiences pain points, talk about what’s interesting for them not only for you, and never include calls to action, they will not generate much engagement.
Another element that might be missing in your content is…
Keywords in Captions
This information came straight from the head of Instagram and revealed that for a post to be found in Search, you should put keywords and hashtags in the caption. The algorithm uses this information to index your content so people can easily find posts related to this term. And this way, we’ve smoothly moved to another point on our audit checklist, which is reviewing your hashtags.
Hashtags can help you get more eyes on your content, and they are super effective, especially for smaller accounts that just started to build their Instagram presence. There’s no magic number for hashtags. You can use as many of them as you want (up to 30), as long as you choose them wisely.
If your insights show that you’re not getting any reach from hashtags, make sure that in your posts, you always include:
- Hashtags specific to your content, niche, and your target audience.
- Relevancy is the key to finding effective hashtags
The best way to check what hashtags work for you is to track their performance. Hashtag Performance feature in the IQ Hashtags tool shows you how your posts ranked for each hashtag. You can use it to make collections of best-performing hashtags to re-use them in the future posts for better visibility and engagement.
The final thought about hashtags is that they aren’t a magic bullet; they will improve your reach but won’t fix poor content, so don’t build your entire strategy around hashtags.
The last but not least point on our checklist is:
Auditing your Instagram audience
- Are your followers your target audience?
- Do you know their interests and the kind of content they enjoy the most?
- Is your profile followed by any mass followers or bots that affect your profile’s engagement rate?
These questions are a very important part of your audit because you’re building your profile to reach a specific audience, so you shouldn’t care about vanity metrics like your followers’ count but the quality of your audience. If people who follow you don’t engage with your content, don’t buy your service or a product, you’re probably not talking to the right people.
Use your profile insights to verify your followers’ demographic – are they the right age, do they come from the right country or even a city if you’re a local business
Then you can check your posts’ insights to improve your engagement and see what posts resonated with the right audience and supported your overall goal (like increasing your website traffic). Make a list of the most popular topics and double down on this content.
Review Your Followers List and See if They Are Not Mass Followers or Bots.
Both aren’t great for your profile engagement as they are not quality followers. You’ll usually recognize bots by some dodgy-sounding usernames like @lady358_1000. There are typically many numbers involved… You can remove them from your profile as they will never engage with your content and only affect your engagement rate.
The same goes for mass followers. If an account that follows more than 2000 profiles follows you, it is unlikely that they will ever see and engage with your content since the competition is relatively high. This kind of profile usually follows everyone as they go, so since they’re not quality followers, you can say goodbye to them too. But before you do that, always make sure that they are not an engaged part of your community.
If you’d like to know more about your audience’s interests based on their activity on the platform, you should test IQ Hashtags Users Analysis tab. It will show you all the demographic data you get from Instagram insights and tell you what your followers are interested in and what hashtags and tags they use the most. This will help you create more engaging content your followers are genuinely interested in.
And that would be the end of our 5 step audit checklist.
Hopefully, it will help you identify the most common errors in your Instagram profile, so now, let’s move to the fun part!
Can You Do an Audit Yourself or Should You Hire Someone?
Auditing your profile can be complicated even if you know what you should pay attention to, so if you’re looking for another pair of eyes to help you set your Instagram profile on the right track then say no more, I’m coming to your rescue.
We’ve recently launched IQ Hashtags Custom Instagram Audits run by me, and my partner in crime. We’ll save you hours of work by reviewing your profile and packing all the tips and observations in a complex PDF with an identification of your profile’s strengths and weaknesses. Your bio, content, and hashtags review with tips on how to fix each of these components of your profile if they aren’t working in your favor, but also, we’ll give you strategy suggestions based on our findings in your account.
All of these to help you grow and achieve your goals. If this sounds interesting to you, make sure to visit the link.
And that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for reading. And I’ll see you in the next one.
