The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest SEO
When it comes to generating traffic for businesses and bloggers, Pinterest is one of the most powerful yet highly underrated platforms out there. Over the years, Pinterest has been associated with DIY how-to, travel blogs, and recipe articles. However, the platform covers a wide variety of topics, and it is one of the most significant drivers of organic traffic in many industries.
Boasting of more than 450 million users every month (source), Pinterest is an unexploited opportunity for SEO professional and business owners that want to increase their traffic significantly. Pinterest is a unique platform where people can discover new businesses, ideas, and blogs, and it provides a lot of room for storytelling and creativity.
Pinterest has become one of the major sources of social revenue for several businesses, especially eCommerce. As a blogger, SEO professional, or business owner, you would be missing a lot if you do not leverage this platform to grow your web of influence and convert most of your fans into customers.
The best way to expand your reach and boost your sales is a strong Pinterest SEO. SEO on this platform is undoubtedly more crucial than on most of the social media platforms out there. In this article, we will walk you through some amazing and effective Pinterest SEO tips that can help expand your reach and drive more sales.
Pinterest SEO Explained
Pinterest SEO is not as complex as most people are seeming it to be. It is all about optimizing your site and Pinterest profile to generate more organic traffic to your site from Pinterest. The search algorithm of Pinterest is different from that of Google SEO. One of the major differences between them is the identification of target “keywords” and how they are used for optimization.
Google SEO and Pinterest SEO also operate on different ranking factors. While the ranking factor of Google focuses more on technical SEO and backlinks, that of Pinterest focuses more on social shares and engagement metrics.
Tips for Optimizing Your Pins for SEO Success
Like typical search engine optimization for web pages, adding keywords to your content is important. Nevertheless, Pinterest SEO takes a step higher.
Pinterest SEO goes beyond the integration of keywords; it involves things such as igniting engagement from your target market, formatting images properly, enabling special Pinterest features such as “Rich Pins” and “Save” button,” and more.
Here are some Pinterest SEO tips to help you drive traffic and boost sales:
1. Start with the Basics – Set Up Your Pinterest Profile for Success
The first step to achieving SEO success on this platform is to set up your Pinterest profile properly. To get started, you should create a Pinterest Business account. If you have a personal account, you can convert it into a business account. Creating a business account will give you access to the Pinterest Ads Manager and Pinterest Analytics.
To enhance your Pinterest SEO, one of the easiest and quickest things you can do is to add keywords to your display name. When picking a keyword to add to your display name, you should pick words that reflect your brand accurately and also increase your chances of being discovered in relevant search queries.
Having an SEO-friendly username is very important, as it would make you stand out from the crowd. For instance, the Pinner – Le Coin de Mel – added four SEO keywords to her display name, and the keywords give you an idea of the kind of content she shares.
While focusing on an SEO-friendly display name, you should also pay some attention to your username too. Your username will be added to the URL of your profile, so you want to choose one that is concise, direct, and memorable. If you have a presence on different social platforms, you should use the same username across all platforms, as this will make it easy for people to discover you. It will also make some of your followers on other social media platforms recognize your account on Pinterest when they come across it.
2. Your Bio Needs to Perfect
Your bio is another vital place to focus on when optimizing your Pinterest profile. You should craft a straightforward and creative bio. Your bio should also contain some strategic keywords. You should fill the “about you” section with only relevant information about you and your business or the services you render.
If you do not have anything specific in mind to write, you should write about yourself as well as the things you can do or offer. After drafting your bio, you should highlight the relevant words that people might search to find your profile.
3. Claim and Prepare Your Website or Online Store
After setting up your business account and creating the perfect bio, the next thing you should do is to claim your website. Fortunately, Pinterest allows you to add your website to your profile, and this is awesome. Featuring your site on your profile serves as a keyword on its own, and this will increase your discoverability on the platform.
Featuring your website on your profile will also make you look more official, and this will help to increase traffic to your website. Pinterest offers two ways of verifying yourself – by verifying yourself as a merchant or claiming your site. By claiming your site, you are telling Pinterest that you are a genuine brand or business.
When you have claimed your website, you will see the following little globe beside your site:
After claiming your site, the next thing you need to do is to prepare it. You can get data from your site and feed your targeted Pinterest campaigns. You can also increase the traffic flow to your website from your Pinterest profile. For these Pinterest SEO efforts to be effective, here are some other things you need to do:
Add Pinterest Tags
The Pinterest tag is the basic aspect of setting up a paid or organic campaign. Pinterest tag is more like the Facebook pixel, and here are some of the things you can do with this little piece of JavaScript:
- Segment your audience
- Set up conversion events on your site
- Report reliably on the performance of your profile.
Add the “Saved Button”
You can add Pinterest’s Save Button to your site with a short piece of HTML code. This will help you to expand the reach of your campaigns beyond Pinterest. When you add this feature to your website, users will be able to save pictures on your website or application to their boards. You can set the button to either appear when a user hovers over the picture or automatically.
4. Create and Pin Engagement-Worth, Quality Content
One of the best ways to remain relevant and sort after is to provide quality content. Quality content is essential when it comes to search engine optimization, whether it has to do with your site, Pinterest, or any other platform. Search engines are now smarter than before, as their algorithms now know how to figure out what people want to see. That is why a website with poorly written, unorganized content and stuffed keywords cannot rank high.
For you to rank higher today, you need to produce something valuable. For your Pinterest profile to stand out from the crowd, you need to provide quality and engagement-worth content. If you do not start with offering quality content, you will hardly make tangible progress because Pinners will not engage your pins. This means if your content is not engaging enough, people will not comment, share, or save it. Many might not even see the need to follow you.
When this happens, the algorithm of Pinterest will know that you are not producing quality content. This will make it impossible or difficult for you to organically attract your target audience. While Pinterest mostly deals with pictures, it is not only about pretty images. Most of the pretty, attractive images you see usually link to videos, blogs, products, eBooks, infographics, and more. Just make sure you create something engaging and eye-catching to attract more pinners to your profile. You should also try to update regularly so your audience does not see one content over and over again.
5. Keyword Research
When it comes to Pinterest SEO, you might not be able to use your normal keyword research tools. However, there is a way you can conduct keyword research on Pinterest. Pinterest creates its feeds based on the searches of users and how content creators use those keywords in the pins they share. Here are some tips to help you choose the right keywords to use:
Guided Search
With the guided search on this platform, users can streamline their focus and look for more relevant results. Whenever you search for a key term, the system will suggest some related modifiers automatically. The suggested results will give you an idea of the most popular search queries about that topic.
Explore Different Niche Topics
Pinterest groups topics in different categories and sub-categories, and this makes finding keywords for a specific niche easier. You should explore your business-related topics to see how ideas are categorized. This will also give you an insight into how your rivals are targeting certain keywords.
Try Promoted Pins
This idea is almost like how search engine optimization experts use AdWords to test the performance of specific keywords before they kickstart an entire SEO campaign. Bringing a similar approach down to Pinterest, you can test your best-performing keywords on Google with Promoted Pins to see how they will perform on Pinterest.
6. Keep Your Boards Optimized and Organized
Boards offer one of the best ways to tell the search engine of Pinterest how you organize your content or/and categorize your products. Organizing and optimizing your board will aid your visibility significantly. Furthermore, when a user visits your profile, the first thing they will see is your board; hence, you want to make sure it is tidy at all times.
The title of your board should be super clear and should speak a lot about you. You should also make sure you have very attractive and eye-catching photos on your board. If you want to gain more engagement and followers, you should populate your board with high-quality pins.
7. Use Rich Pins
If you are an e-commerce business owner using Pinterest to promote your business, we highly recommend you use Rich Pins for better Pinterest SEO. Rich Pins help to keep the description, pricing, and other information of your products up-to-date on the platform. With this, whenever you change the price of a product on your site, the system will update your product Rich Pin automatically.
That way, the traffic coming in from Pinterest to your online store will not see a different price from what they saw on the platform. If users keep seeing different prices, your traffic will reduce, and this will affect your conversion rate.
8. Follow Other Pinterest Accounts
One of the best ways to boost your visibility is to follow other accounts. The accounts you follow on Pinterest are important. Pinterest sees your following list as a solid indicator, and this will determine where you will appear in the suggested profiles and boards of users. When you follow the right people, your profile and boards will be suggested to the right audience.
9. Aim for Engagement
Getting more engagement on your Pinterest profile will help to drive more traffic to your website or store. As you begin to get more engagements, your chances of being recommended to other pinners will increase. If you want to get more engagement, you should consider the following:
- Choose the Perfect Time to Post: If people see and react to your posts quickly, there is a higher chance of Pinterest noticing and boosting your posts in search results. Hence, you should make sure you post your content at the best time. Research has shown that more users scroll through their feed in the evening and their free time. However, the best time to post also depends on the type of followers you have, their goals, as well as the type of content you want to post.
- Link Your Pinterest Profile to Your Social Media Accounts: You can also get more engagement by linking your social media accounts to Pinterest. This way, you will engage both your existing and new followers.
- Respond to Your Follower: You should reply to comments from your followers and answer most of their questions.
Conclusion
Pinterest is a highly remarkable platform for marketing products and services. However, you need to know how to find your way around it to make the most out of it. We hope you found this Pinterest SEO guide useful and you will apply most of the tips here to enhance your Pinterest SEO strategy.
Check out Tailwind, a scheduler tool for Pins on Pinterest