As a small business owner with a growing Instagram presence, you understand the importance of reaching a wider audience. But with limited resources and budget, achieving significant organic growth can seem like a daunting task.
Believe it or not, the secret weapon you’ve been overlooking might already be at your fingertips: hashtags. This blog post walks you through strategic Instagram hashtag SEO and how it can propel small businesses with under 5,000 followers to new heights.
Are you ready? Read on to know more!
Firstly, you have to understand that you have to conquer relevant hashtag feeds as much as you can as this is another type of search engine to get ranked on top. So why not use it?
Now let’s move on to how small businesses with under 5k followers can leverage hashtags on Instagram. In your post, whether it is Reels or a regular post, you should use a maximum of 30 hashtags.
I know there are lots of opinions about how to use Instagram hashtags, but today, I’m focusing on ‘how to conquer hashtag feeds and utilize them as search engines.’. Because once your post gets ranked on top of the feed with the targeted right keywords, then it will bring you lots of traffic to your profile, then your website, and more!
If you do not have access to any hashtag analytics, then try to pick hashtags with over 1,000 posts but under 100k posts with fewer than 100 likes in top posts.
For example, the above hashtags have under 100k posts. And you are gonna check out how many Likes they’ve got, but if they hid their likes then you are gonna look through it manually.
So if it has likes under 100, you can use these hashtags to rank on top of the hashtag feed. Additionally, if you discover another hashtag with over 1,000 posts but fewer than 100k posts and with fewer than 100 likes in the top posts, you can certainly use it.
I used 20 hashtags for the Tuesday, Feb 21 content, and the content was ranked with 15 hashtags. (75%)
Also, 6 out of 9 hashtags ranked(67%). 11 out of 21 hashtags ranked(52%).
14 out of 21 hashtags ranked(67%), 15 out of 26 hashtags ranked(57%), and 17 out of 21 hashtags ranked(81%).
How can you track all of this?
✅ Today's action steps for you
- If you prefer manual tracking
(especially if you use non-English hashtags or are comfortable with manual methods)
- Find hashtags with over 1,000 posts but under 100k posts and fewer than 100 likes in top posts.
- Collect these hashtags in your Google sheet. You can check how I organize hashtags by category
- Use 30 hashtags per post, including 10 in English and 10-20 in your preferred language (Korean, Japanese, Spanish).
- Continue this for at least 2 weeks and monitor hashtag feeds when you post content—check the top post feed immediately after publishing, one day after, and then weekly.
- Assess if your keywords are targeting the right people. If not, find other relevant hashtags that fit your ideal audience
- If you can use hashtag analytics like Flick
- Find hashtags with over 1,000 posts but under 100k posts and fewer than 100 likes in top posts, focusing on low to medium competition. You can also adjust the likes range.
- Collect these hashtags in your Flick collection.
- Use 30 hashtags per post, including 10 in English and 10-20 in your preferred language(Korean, Japanese, Spanish…)
- Analyze your posts using hashtag analytics. Note that Flick can only track English hashtags. Do this right after publishing your content, one day after publishing, and then weekly.
- Assess if your keywords are targeting the right people. If not, find other relevant hashtags that fit your ideal audience
Check out below free videos below for you!!!
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Hyein
Side note: I’ve included an affiliate link to Flick but I’m not promoting anything related to the Flick company. I just love their services.
I'm an award-winning global marketing expert running HY Marketing in South Korea. We help businesses succeed in South Korea, Japan, and English-speaking markets through SEO, social media, and paid ads.
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