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Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist, or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach and this is Shiny New New Clients. Someone slid into my comment section on Instagram yesterday and said the most beautiful words. I found this post through a Google search. Oh, it's delicious. It's working. Instagram 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, 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, 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. But 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. When we're talking about these platforms, we have to remember billions of people use them. Because I always hear this like, argument in my head of, yeah, but I never type. And 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 B roll reels or short like one liners or, you know, 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, 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 posts answers that question, they ask Google. Google might show them 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 posts 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 again. 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. 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 her conversation, 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 going to 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, 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 that brings your idle 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 you. 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, it's looking at the actual content. So if your people are asking for high protein breakfast ideas, you want your caption to very clearly say, five high protein breakfast ideas. If your 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, 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. Here's another place you can harness SEO on Instagram. Your name line in Instagram You've got your handle, right? So mine is Jenna's page. That's my handle. And then I have my nameline. Jenna Harding, Marketing Coach. A lot of times on that nameline people put made up things, like maybe, 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. And 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 want to make sure to be using the words your clients are using. If your clients would call you a dietitian, don't put Food Wizard. If your clients would call you a dog trainer, don't put Dog Whisperer in that, specifically in that name line on Instagram. This is exciting because we also have been seeing. This is anecdotal. I 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 Google indexes Instagram just came out in July of 2025. You have to have a business account or 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 post 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 Ask ChatGPT 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. So 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 to just to like remind myself which of my reels and my Reels 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, you 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 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 from now. I'll see you in the next one.
Host: Jenna Harding
Episode: Instagram and SEO in 2026 (and whether hashtags are still worth it)
Date: March 2, 2026
Duration: ~20 min
In this high-energy solo episode, marketing coach Jenna Harding dives deep into the evolving landscape of Instagram in 2026. She explores the intersection of Instagram and SEO, unpacks the fading importance of hashtags, and gives actionable tips for making Instagram content discoverable via both the platform’s search and Google. Ideal for entrepreneurs and service-based businesses, Jenna keeps the focus practical, drawing from recent personal experiences and audience questions.
Jenna wraps up with a teaser for next week’s special episode featuring an SEO expert and an invitation to her flagship program, Magic Marketing Machine.
She encourages business owners to start experimenting with Instagram SEO strategies now—clarifying questions, optimizing captions, and making discoverable evergreen content—to take advantage of the evolving platform.
Summary prepared by Podcast Summarizer AI.