The short answer: write what you do and where you work in your profile's name field, the bold line under your photo. Instagram compares what someone types with the words it finds in your username, your bio, your captions, your hashtags and the places you tag, as the company said when it explained how Instagram search works. If your profile says only "Ashley Rivera", there is no word for nail tech and no city name in there for the app to find.
What Instagram reads when someone searches
That official explanation, published on Instagram's blog in August 2021, describes search in two parts. First it tries to match what the person typed against the text it can read in the app: usernames, bios, captions, hashtags and places. Then it puts the results in order, and the strongest signal is still the text that was typed, followed by what that person already does in the app (who they follow, what they open) and by how popular each result is. The same post gives a tip made for anyone who serves one neighborhood: if your account is tied to one place, like a small business, putting your location in your bio makes it easier for people nearby to find you.
That is why big accounts tend to sit at the top. It also shows what is in your hands today. You do not choose who someone follows, and you will not gain followers by Friday, but you can rewrite the text on your profile in five minutes, and that text is the first of the three doors.
Your name and your @ are two different fields
The @ is your address, the one someone types to land straight on you, and the one sitting inside every link you have already sent by text message. The name is that line in bold sitting right below your picture. It takes spaces and ordinary words, and it is the field that tends to say nothing about your work.
Changing your @ carries a cost nobody mentions: every old link to your profile points at the @ you gave up, and that @ becomes free. The Help Center page on usernames warns that you can only go back to it if nobody else has taken it, and that your followers may be notified of the change. The name field has none of that. Rewrite it and nothing that is already out there breaks.
What to change on your profile
| How it tends to look | What to put there instead |
|---|---|
| Name: "Ashley Rivera" | Name: "Ashley Rivera | Nail Tech in Austin" |
| Name: "Studio AR" | Name: "Studio AR | Gel Extensions, East Austin" |
| Bio: "Creating smiles ✨" | Keep the line and add one under it: "Dentist in Round Rock. Whitening and veneers" |
| Posts published with no place tagged | Tag your neighborhood, or a spot people nearby recognize, which is more specific than the whole city |
| Personal account | Professional account connected to the business's Facebook Page, with the address filled in on that Page. That is what puts your business on the Instagram map as a place people can tag |
Look at the bio row. "Creating smiles" is a good line, it has personality, and nobody needs to delete it. What is missing is the line under it naming the job and the city, because a nice phrase on its own does not answer someone who typed "dentist Round Rock".
What to do this week
- Today: open your profile and read the name field as if you had never seen it. If it does not say what you do and where, rewrite it.
- Also today: if the account is still personal, switch it to professional in Settings, under Account type and tools. Then fill in the address on the business's Facebook Page and connect the account to it.
- On your next posts: tag the place, and pick your own neighborhood, or a landmark close to you, over the city name on its own. You can only tag places that already exist on Instagram, so choose the closest one that shows up in the list.
- In your captions: write the service using the words a client uses when they message you, not the technical name only people in your field know.
- A few weeks later: search the term yourself, from a phone where you are not logged into your own account, and see where you landed.
Searching from a phone that is not yours matters. On your own phone, what you have already done in the app weighs on the order of results, according to that Instagram post, and your profile tends to rank higher for you than for a client.
The mistake that comes up most
Stuffing the name field with loose words. "Nail Tech Austin Nails Gel Extensions Acrylic Manicure" fits in the field, and what happens is that whoever lands on your profile reads a list instead of understanding whose account this is. The field does two jobs at once, getting found and being understood, and the second one is where work comes from. Two pieces of information are enough: what you do and where.
The other mistake is writing the city only in your highlights or in the last line of your bio and calling it done. It is written down, and Instagram does read the bio, but the name field is the one you control most easily and the one a person reads first in a list of results.
When this will not change anything
If you serve clients anywhere by video call, putting a city in your name works against you: it tells anyone far away that this is not for them. Write the service and leave the place out.
If people reach you through word of mouth, they search your name and will find you regardless. What decides things then is the profile they land on, and the conversation tends to stall for a different reason. We wrote about why nobody messages you even when your profile gets visitors.
We checked on September 18, 2026, on the Help Center page about business information, how an address becomes a place: you edit the address on your Facebook Page, connect your Instagram account to that Page, and within 48 hours the location shows on the Instagram map and can be tagged in posts and stories.
And if you fix the profile today while the account has been quiet for months, showing up in search only brings someone to a page with nothing new on it. The text opens the door, what holds attention is what that person sees next. If you stopped a while ago, start with posting again without trying to make up for lost time, and once the rhythm is back it is worth reading how to reach your first thousand followers.
ZapPost delivers the carousel, the Reels script and the caption ready to go. No writing prompts, no Canva, no new tool to learn. You review and publish.
Frequently asked questions
Does putting my city in my profile name really help?
It helps when your clients are nearby. Instagram matches the text of a search against what is written on the profile, so "nail tech Austin" only finds accounts carrying those words in some field. If nobody wrote the city, a search with a city in it does not reach you.
Should I change my @ to include my service?
In many cases it is not worth it. The old @ lives on in text conversations, on printed cards and in links from other sites, and all of that stops working when you switch. The name field does the same job in search and breaks nothing.
Does tagging a location on posts make a difference?
A place is one of the texts Instagram reads in search. And according to the page on adding a location, anyone who taps the location on a post sees the other posts tagged at the same spot on the Instagram map. Tagging your neighborhood or a landmark near you puts your post next to the others from that part of town, where the client who can actually come to you is.
Do I need a professional account for this?
To write your service into the name field, no. For your business address to become a place on the Instagram map, yes, and the account also has to be connected to the Facebook Page that holds the address. The switch to a professional account lives in Settings and makes the account public if it was private. Your profile then shows the business category under your photo, and you can hide that label later, as the page about professional accounts explains.