This episode of Tay’s Tips is a read-through of the article below. The full text is the transcript.
I see it every day. A gorgeous photo, a decent caption, and then a pile of words dumped underneath like confetti. Luxury interior designer. Modern home. Scottsdale renovation. Custom kitchen. High-end design. No sentence. No point. Just keywords, stacked, hoping something notices. Every time, I think the same thing. That isn’t SEO. That’s guessing in public. And I get why people do it.
This is a hand-me-down from old Google. For years, search ran on matching. You typed words, Google found the pages that used those words the most, and repetition won. So a whole generation of business owners learned one thing in their bones: visibility is a numbers game, so cram in as many keywords as you can. Then everybody took that habit and pasted it onto Instagram, where it doesn’t work and never did.
Two things read your caption now
Here’s what’s actually happening when you post. Two very different search systems can pick up your caption, and they want different things. One is Instagram’s own search. Instagram is a search engine now, not just a feed.
People type real phrases into that bar, like “brand designer for coaches” or “kitchen remodel before and after,” and Instagram serves back what fits. It reads your caption, your name field, your bio, your alt text to figure out what you’re about. The other is AI. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google’s AI to “recommend a brand designer for wellness businesses,” it writes an answer. And public Instagram captions get pulled into that answer now. Your words are part of what it reads to decide if you’re the one worth naming.
One matches. The other understands. The keyword pile fails both. It hands Instagram a jumble with no clear topic, and it gives AI nothing to actually repeat.
What to do instead
The fix is almost annoyingly simple. Write like a specific person who knows exactly who they help. Say it in real sentences. Here’s what that looks like.
Put your keywords in a sentence, up top. Not “brand designer Phoenix luxury coach.” Instead: “A brand identity for a Phoenix wellness coach who was finally ready to charge what she’s worth.” Same words. One reads like spam. One reads like you. Front-load it, because the first line is what both search and a real human decide on.
Fix your name field. The bold text on your profile, not your handle, is searchable and carries real weight. Most people leave it as just their name and disappear for what they actually do. “Tay | Brand & Website Designer” does more than thirty hashtags ever will.
Write your alt text. Instagram lets you add it to every image. One plain sentence describing the photo. It helps people who can’t see the image, and it tells the platform exactly what’s in the post.
Use a few real hashtags. Three to five that actually describe the post. Not thirty. The wall of hashtags doesn’t rank you, and it’s the exact thing that reads as amateur.
Say the same thing everywhere. This is the one for AI. Your bio, your captions, your website should all describe you the same way. Same person, same audience, same words. When they match, the picture of you sharpens and you get easier to recommend. When they all say it a little differently, you blur, and blurry doesn’t get named.
Keep the account public. All of this only works on a public professional or creator account. A private account is invisible to search and to AI. If you want to be found, the door has to be open. One honest note. Instagram still gets pulled into AI answers less than places like Reddit and LinkedIn, because most captions are thin. That’s the opening. The people who actually write clear, specific captions are the ones getting read while everyone else stacks keywords. Your website still does the heavy lifting for AI. Your captions just back it up now instead of sitting behind a wall.
The before and after
Before: Home reveal ✨ #interiordesign #luxuryhomes #modernkitchen #scottsdaleinteriordesigner #customhome #renovation #highenddesign #interiordesigner #homedecor #designinspo #kitchendesign
After: This Scottsdale kitchen went from builder-beige to the reason her whole family hangs out in one room. A full renovation for a client who wanted warm, modern, and impossible to walk past. Swipe for the before. [name field: Kelsey | Interior Designer, Scottsdale] [alt text: warm modern kitchen with white oak cabinets and a marble island] #interiordesign #scottsdaleinteriors #kitchenrenovation
Same searchable words. One buries them in a pile. The other puts them in a sentence a real person would say, which is the whole thing both Instagram and AI are built to reward. Stop seasoning your captions with keywords. Just tell me what you do and who it’s for, like a human. That was always the work the pile was trying to skip.
If your captions and your website still read like a keyword dump, that is usually the difference between getting scrolled past and being the name that comes up.
