A Simplified Guide To Pinterest SEO

If you have underestimated Pinterest, thinking it is just a casual social media platform, then you must think again—Pinterest is one of the most powerful tools.

More than 416 million people visit Pinterest each month. So, just imagine the number of visitors it can bring to your website. 

And, the most important thing is, it can connect your brand with online shoppers. 

Along with that, Pinterest can also boost your brand’s visibility and bring more traffic to your site.  

In this guide, I am going to discuss all about Pinterest SEO, which would give you LOADS OF TRAFFIC to your Pinterest profile. 

Pinterest Is A Visual Search Engine!!!

Although Pinterest is a social media platform, at the same time, it is also a visual search engine. 

In May 2021, Pinterest announced processing over 5 billion monthly searches, 2 billion more than DuckDuckGo

After looking at this stat, you must believe that Pinterest is a big search engine giant. 

Pinterest has really spent years understanding what users actually want and then turning that understanding into actionable resources for businesses and business owners. 

And, the ranking factor, on which you should be focused is Relevancy. You must show the pins are relevant to the queries people are searching for. 

How Does Pinterest Search Engine Algorithm Work?

Let me start with the basics. As you know, you can pin any image you find online. You can easily compile and streamline the images and topics you find necessary. 

For instance, you can easily find and search for a golden retriever, save it to make your own board, and make it visible to your followers too. 

But, then, the question is, “How does Pinterest know what content to show up when a user searches for a query?”

Here are the factors, Pinterest ranks the content on:

• Domain quality
• Pin quality
• Pinner quality
• Topic relevance

But, then again the question that arises is, how does the pin quality determine?

Pinterest’s pin quality is determined by its freshness, popularity, and, most importantly, the engagement it gets. 

Pinterest takes it as a positive sign when other users check on your pins and share them on theirs. You can improve the pin quality by using appealing images as your pin. 

It also checks if you are regularly active on the platform on not. However, in between all these things, keyword relevancy also matters. Keywords affect what appears in the Pinterest search. 

Optimize Your Pinterest Profile To Get Higher Rankings

Optimization of Pinterest depends on various elements. Here, we are going to discuss some of them below:

Claim Your Business website On Pinterest

This is the very first step with Pinterest SEO. This is an official way you let pinterest know that the business that you claim to be your own is actually your own. In this step, you verify your domain which requires adding a link to your website. 

This is very simple to do. There are 4 ways to claim your business website on pinterest. Each method uses either an HTML tag, HTML file, or TXT record and it requires little technical knowledge to use all the 4 ways.

Write An Appealing Company Description

After setting up and claiming your business website on Pinterest, the next thing that is very significant to do is write an appealing company description. Pinterest gives 500 characters’ worth of space; make the white space count. 

Check out the other brands’ descriptions in your niche and then describe your brand as best as possible. Explain what you do, why you do it, and what value you bring to your customers’ lives.

Check out how Rolex did it:

Now, see what Microsoft in education says,

While writing an appealing company description, don’t forget to add keywords relevant to your niche. 

Create Engaging And High-Quality Pin

When we talk about SEO, it doesn’t matter if it is for the website, YouTube, or social media. SEO begins with quality content.  

You must not forget that search engines have become so smart that they can detect what users would like to see. That’s why you just can’t put random content up and think, you won’t get caught by the algorithms. 

Because the algorithms are much smarter than before, you must create content that provides real value to the user. Give your users what they are truly eager to know. 

The same concept here applies to Pinterest, if you don’t create engaging pins, people are not going to engage with them. They won’t simply “like, comment, and “share” it. And most importantly, they will not even follow you!!! 

And, once the algorithms detect, that you are not preparing appropriate content, they won’t rank you higher, and it will become more difficult for you to rank your posts on Pinterest. 

But, next, the question that arises is, “What kind of content is good for Pinterest?”

There are varieties of content good for Pinterest:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Infographics
• E-books
• Products

You can use tools like Canva to create such content for pins. Pinterest only allows you to re-pin the same post 4 times per month. Pinterest wants to see different content, but those pins can link to the same content. 

Find What Users Want To See

Many think it is significant to perform keyword research for Pinterest; however, they are not wrong… Before performing keyword research, you must understand what the users want to know. 

Which is, of course, the easiest thing to do… You will get a glimpse of what your users want by simply going to Pinterest and searching for the term in the search bar you want to create content for. 

Like this:

As you can see in the image above, while searching for the keyword “digital marketing,”  I found various new keywords in the suggestion box. Although I haven’t got the volume of all those keywords, I have an idea of what my target audience is searching for. 

It is just an idea-generation process. Here, you can explore the possibilities of the keywords. 

Do you think you have randomly found digital marketing keywords? Well, of course, not. These are the keywords that users are searching for. 

Explore the competitor boards, dig deeper for searches, and find new topics; if you find them worthy of creating a pin, then you must go! 

Write Keyword-Optimized Descriptions And Boards

Now that you have understood what your target audience wishes to see. So, now it’s time you understand what content would draw their attention toward you. While writing, add a thorough description with long-tail keywords. 

Work the same way on the Pinterest board. 

Read More: Tips For SEO Keyword Research: Tools & Examples

Use Proper Hashtags

Almost every social media platform gives you the opportunity to add hashtags to your social media posts. Although you can add more than 20 hashtags on Pinterest, you don’t want to add more than 4 in any given post.  

Because too many hashtags are always distracting and irritating… Plus, it also makes your post look spammy. 

And the relevancy of the post also matters when it comes to Pinterest SEO. 

Use High-Quality Images

Since, pinterest is a visual search engine, you must make the most out of the images. 85% of the Pinterest audience is female, so if you are targeting this segment, it is must to use this platform as your social media strategy. 

Especially, if your product or services needs to be shown through images. 

Here is the image sizes that you should have:

Add Pinterest “Save” Button To Images On Your Site

Would you believe it if I said you could gain more followers and engagement just by adding a “save” button to your images? 

If you sell jewelry, you have already got pin-worthy material on your website. By adding a “save” button to such images, pinners can also save those images to their pins. 

When applying the “Save” button, you can either make it appear by default or you can make it appear when a user hovers over it. It is extremely important to add a “save” button, especially when your website is getting high traffic from Pinterest. 

Add Pinterest Tag To Your Website 

The pinterest tag is the code to track the traffic that comes from Pinterest and see what the user does once he visits the site. Check out if they are making a purchase? Signing up for a newsletter or doing something else. 

The addition of the pinterest tag doesn’t affect the SEO directly. The information that you get from the pinterest tag helps you make SEO efforts in the right direction. You can find out information like, which keywords gets the paying customers to your site and more.

Track Analytics

Pinterest also gives you an opportunity to study your analytics. It allows you to access your data and make changes accordingly. Pinterest analytics will help you find more keywords to target, check conversions, and spark engagement.  

Pinterest Ad Formats

Pinterest gives you an opportunity to add several ads like, 

• Standard
• Video
• Shopping
• Carouse
• Collections 

Choose the type of ad you as per your niche and requirements. For instance, if you sell some services, you can add collections that would suit the best for your needs. Video ads can act as product demos. 

Pinterest SEO Infographic

Conclusion 

With these tips and tricks, you can develop perfect and high-returning Pinterest SEO strategies. 

The above-given SEO strategies are enough to help you go with Pinterest SEO. If you have any doubts or queries, you can simply comment down below in the comment section, and I am going to help you for sure! 

Schedule a 30-minute free strategy session with us and make your Pinterest profile rock the “Explore Page.” Still, waiting? Go get your Pinterest profile optimized right now!