Pinterest SEO Guide + Free Cheatsheet

Pinterest SEO Guide to Boost Search Rankings & Increase Traffic

Looking to boost your Pinterest SEO?

Want to expand the reach your pins get and send more traffic to your website?

Wish you could double your email list size and increase your monthly income?

I’ve got you covered in this tutorial, plus at the end you’ll find a resource that helped me ignite traffic growth to my website using Pinterest! But if you can’t wait to see the resource, then here’s a sneak peak.

In this guide you’re going to discover:

How Pinterest algorithms work
How to set up Pinterest boards
How to optimize your pin descriptions

3 Quick Strategies to Boost Your Pinterest SEO

To master Pinterest SEO you must first understand the concept behind SEO.

For example, if you go to Google right now and type in a word or phrase, you’ll get a list of articles and websites you can read.

These are meant to be ranked in order of their helpfulness and relevance to the topic you searched for. Google doesn’t want to show poor quality articles.

Pinterest acts in the EXACT same way.

Pinterest uses an algorithm to rank its pins in an order that they think will be most relevant to their users. This smart feed algorithm (like Google’s) displays the best pins first, not the newest ones.

Because think of it this way: if you log in to Pinterest and your feed is full of tons of pins that are irrelevant to you and your interests, what will happen?

Eventually, you’ll stop using Pinterest.

And if people stop using Pinterest, then Pinterest loses money, users, investors, and eventually their entire brand. So it’s in their best interest to use algorithms that show you content they know you’ll love.

What does this mean for you? It means you have to ensure that Pinterest is ranking your content in their feed (and preferably in one of the top positions). Otherwise, you’ll struggle to get re-pins, profile views, followers, and traffic to your website if no one sees your pins!

This is why you are here today, seeking a guide to Pinterest SEO that will help boost your pins rankings in the Pinterest feed so they can be seen by your target audience.

I think it’s time to get started, shall we?

Pinterest SEO Strategy #1: Create boards that your target audience wants to follow.

On your blog, you probably have “categories” to organize your content. If your blog is about football, would you have a category for your blog posts titled “golf swing”? No, right?

Same goes with Pinterest.

You only want relevant boards that your ideal target audience would be searching for. When someone stops by your profile, they’ll peak at your boards and say “woah, this is the account I’ve been looking for” and they’ll stick around.

So, remove any boards that are irrelevant to your ideal audience.

Warning: If you delete an entire board, it will also delete any followers who are just following that particular board. But don’t worry, your “true” fans who are loyal to your brand would have followed your profile so they could be subscribed to all your boards in the first place.

How many boards should your Pinterest account have?

It’s recommended that you have at least 10 boards on your profile.

On my account Ask Nick Foy (let’s connect by the way), I have exactly 35 boards ranging from social media to email marketing to traffic growth. These are all topics I know my target audience will be searching for to help them build their online business and improve their marketing savvy-ness.

Pinterest SEO Strategy #2. Add keywords to your board descriptions.

A big mistake I made when I first created my Pinterest account was leaving the board descriptions blank! Board descriptions are valuable real estate Pinterest gives you to help your content be found.

If you type into the search bar a keyword like “Fitness Tips,” then you’ll notice that the results aren’t just pins. You can sort the results to show All Pins, Pins, Buyable Pins, People, and Boards.

From an SEO perspective, it is important to think like a user when picking a board’s title and name it the way it would be searched.

Therefore, when people search keywords related to your board description and board name, your Pinterest board will hopefully rank near the top helping to get you traffic, clicks, and re-pins.

Another super important reason for having board descriptions is that your Pinterest boards themselves can rank on Google. Crazy right?

If someone types a phrase into Google, your Pinterest board could pop up as a top search result which can lead to tons of new followers, website visitors, email subscribers, and potential customers for your business!

Here is an example photo of how to add keywords to your board descriptions.

Pinterest SEO Strategy #3. Add Pinterest savvy descriptions to your pins.

The most important part of SEO for Pinterest is optimizing the pins themselves! Think about the lifespan of your Pinterest account for a second. If you pin 50 pins per day, 1500 pins per month, and 18,000 pins per year, that is a lot of pinning!

Now imagine optimizing a large majority of these pins descriptions for Pinterest SEO.

That’s a lot of potential to get your brand found, visitors to your website, and new leads for your business. Thus, you see why a pin’s description is a very important part of your Pinterest SEO strategy.

So how does Pinterest view your descriptions when ranking pins?

Pinterest favours the pins that provide a specific and thoughtful description, one that helps the users find the image they are looking for when performing a search.

If Pinterest didn’t show you images relevant to your search, you would stop using Pinterest.

Your goal is to make your descriptions relevant to a user’s search!

Here’s what to do…

On every pin that you share from YOUR website, you should write a description. Add all the details that describe your image and create a natural flow of text that will favor your pin’s discovery towards others.

What about pins you share of other people?

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend spending time to edit these descriptions. Because you’re posting 30-40 times per day and a large majority are pins of other peoples, you can see how much time it would take each day to optimize the descriptions for pins that aren’t yours.

Whether you write descriptions for the other stuff you pin or not, writing descriptions for YOUR content is totally necessary.

How to Write a Pinterest Description

The following are three things you should include in your Pinterest description:

A conversational tone.
Keywords that your target audience would be searching for.
A call to action.

Let’s break it down.

Conversational Tone

You want the user to read your pin description and feel like you’re talking to them in person like you would with a friend. This tactic will attract your target audience and get them engaged with your pins.

Keywords

Consider what you are pinning and what blog post the pin is linking to before writing your description. Research some keyword ideas related to your pin that you could rank for in Pinterest. Think about it in terms of the user. What would they be searching in the Pinterest search bar? Then use these keywords in your description so they flow with the conversational tone.

Call to Action

I like to call this tactic the “Call to Pin” instead of call to action but it’s the same thing! At the end of your description, include a call to ask like “repin this to save it for later” or “click the link to check out my 5 tips on ____”

By asking users to take action, you’ll increase the number of repins or clicks to your website compared to pins that don’t use a call to action. And more re-pins can help your pin rank higher in the Pinterest’s Smart Feed.

Bonus Tip: Pinterest’s “Picked for You” Feature

Pinterest also has something called “picked for you,” which are pins that Pinterest literally picks for you, based on your interests, and pops into your Pinterest feed. If you DON’T use keywords, then it will be hard for Pinterest to find your pins and recommend them to people who may become loyal followers after seeing your pin as a “picked for you” article.

Concluding Thoughts for Pinterest SEO

Overall, your Pinterest SEO strategy should follow the three main tips we covered today:

Create boards that target your ideal audience.
Add keywords to your board descriptions.
Add strategic descriptions to your pins themselves.

If you do these things, you’ll begin noticing more impressions, re-pins, clicks, saves, and comments on your pins.

To track your results over time and see how these strategies are making a difference, I recommend checking your Pinterest analytics once per week. Pick out a day of the week to log your stats and over time see how they’re improving!

To get access to Pinterest analytics you must have a business account, not a personal account. Check out my resource for you below, Profitable Pinterest Traffic which will help you get your account set up properly.

Related Articles:

Join “Profitable Pinterest Traffic”

Once you’ve set up your Pinterest account, the next step will be getting traffic to your website. You can go the slow route and try to learn it all on your own or you can take the best route which is joining my training course.

If you want to learn how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website to quickly grow your audience, double your email list size, and make a living online then make sure you check out my course, Profitable Pinterest Traffic.

It comes with worksheets, checklists, and lots of training videos to help you set up your Pinterest profile and drive traffic back to a website page or email landing page. Discover the strategies to rank your pins higher in the search feed so they get found by Pinterest users. Save yourself time and money using my system.

Get started driving traffic to your website

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By the way, are you following Ask Nick Foy on Pinterest? I share tons of tips for bloggers and marketers. You can follow me here!

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