Pinterest is no longer just a social media platform. It has become a powerful search engine that presents users with visually appealing search results. This makes it a great tool for digital marketing. To make full use of it, you have to start with SEO for Pinterest.
Marketers, brands and even influencers can drive website traffic through Pinterest. They can use this platform strategically to expand their online visibility along with click-through rates.
However, there is a procedure for profiting from this platform. In this blog, we will discuss the tips and techniques of Pinterest SEO to give your marketing campaign a proper boost.
What is Pinterest Search Engine Optimization?
Pinterest SEO is an optimization process that involves improving the quality of profiles and pins to drive more organic traffic. It optimizes Pinterest content using relevant keywords and high-quality images. This results in a better rank in Pinterest search results, thereby enhancing their visibility to the target audience.
Pinterest SEO is quite similar to traditional Google SEO. The strategies a web page needs to drive organic website traffic are analogous to the ones used to optimize your Pinterest account. The tips include performing keyword structure, auditing Pinterest profile URL, creating rich content along with other strategies.
Why is Pinterest SEO Important?
Pinterest is a social media platform with a huge website traffic. 1.16 billion users visit the app, which makes it a highly competitive space. Additionally, its visual discovery engine feature has made people use it often as a search engine.
So, considering the competition that comes with popularity, SEO for Pinterest is really important for those who want to draw more attention from the audience to their pins.
- Enhanced Visibility
An effective SEO for Pinterest helps you optimize your pins efficiently. It strategically lets you place the keywords for better exposure to your target audience, which might sometimes even go beyond. So, optimizing your pins with relevant keywords and descriptions increases your chances of appearing in higher ranks on SERPs. As a result, it increases your visibility to both Pinterest bots as well as the audience.
- Improved Brand Awareness
When you frequently upload pins to your board, they keep appearing in relevant search results or feeds. Even if the user has not searched for that particular product or anything in general, your pins will keep showing to them. This is how a solid SEO works to improve your brand awareness.
- Persistent Discoverability
The best thing about the Pinterest platform is that it is not time-sensitive. This implies the fact that other social media platforms tend to lose the visibility and impact of the posts over time. This is not the case for Pinterest.
The unique feature of the Pinterest algorithm is that it keeps the discoverability of well-optimized persistent content. Even after months and years, it has the potential to drive traffic. Once it is up on the app, it won’t let users forget about it! That’s pretty evergreen!
- Competitive Advantage
Well, there may be many competitors in your niche who might not yet tap into the potential of SEO. So, if you add SEO tips to your marketing strategy, there is a high chance that you will get an edge over your competitors. It helps you become more noticeable among others, which boosts your prominence among your target audience.
Which industries should prioritize Pinterest SEO?
Videos that create trends over Pinterest are synonymous with online marketing while they are also considered to be more than just another e-commerce tool. Many industries can leverage Pinterest’s visual search engine to increase brand visibility, drive traffic, and engage with their target audience. Here is a list of industries that can adopt Pinterest SEO as their top priority:
- Home Decor and Interior Design: These types of industries that depend heavily on visuals have the opportunity to exhibit their commodities and services through spellbinding pictures. Pinterest users frequently look for ideas on renovations, do-it-yourself assignments as well as decoration concepts. Therefore, by improving pins with related phrases, such businesses can catch the attention of future clients who are looking for design motivation.
- Travel and Tourism: Travel organizations, accommodations, and tourist places can depict vacation spots, traveling advice and travel plans on Pinterest. They may design boards that pertain to certain areas or travel concepts; this way, users looking forward to their holidays will be wooed more. Best pins have the potential to upgrade bookings as well as make the brand more known.
- Food and Beverage: Restaurants, cafes and food brands can share mouth-watering images of their dishes, recipes and cooking tips. Pinterest is a well-known platform for seeking out recipes and planning meals. These businesses can therefore appeal to gourmet lovers and potential customers searching for culinary creativity by optimizing their pins related to foods.
- Fashion and Beauty: Visually appealing pins have been used by clothing brands or cosmetics companies as well as beauty salons to showcase their products and services. Often, Pinterest users look for clothes style ideas, makeup tutorials and different kinds of hairstyles. When these pins are optimized, there is a likelihood of boosting the sales in products and hence increasing the number of service bookings too.
- Health and Wellness: Workout routines, wholesome recipes and self-care tips can be shared by fitness centers, yoga studios and wellness brands. Health-related searches are frequent among Pinterest users thus these businesses can consider using relevant keywords while pinning so as to attract health-conscious people looking for advice and products.
- Education and E-learning: Online course vendors and academic organizations utilize Pinterest as a platform for sharing infographics, study recommendations, and educational information. Pinterest serves as a reliable source of study aids and inspiration for many users. For students and lifelong learners, pins that have been well-optimized can help in drawing them towards various courses or programs.
- Wedding and Event Planning: One of the best ways for wedding planners, event organizers and other related businesses to show off their services is via well-curated boards. Pinterest is one of the most popular sites for people looking for ideas about weddings and events. To draw in couples or individuals organizing an event searching for ideas and vendors, these businesses should optimize their pins using suitable keywords.
- Arts and Crafts: Tutorials, project ideas, and product showcases may be shared as such by artists, craftspeople, and hobby supply stores. This platform is a favorite for DIYers and hobby enthusiasts alike. Therefore, these companies can make use of optimized pins to market themselves to those who are searching for creativity and materials.
- Real Estate and Architecture: Showcasing Property hit by Real estate agents, architects and home builders, architectural designs and home improvement ideas. In search of their dream homes and renovation inspiration, Pinterest users are frequented by such seekers. Potential buyers in the property market can be attracted through optimized pins.
- Gardening and Landscaping: Plant nurseries, landscaping firms, as well as gardening supply retailers may exchange gardening advice, and garden planning concepts and show their wares. Numerous Pinterest users are looking for ideas and guidance related to horticultural hobbies. Such businesses can use optimized pins to target people who are passionate about the environment and those who want to make purchases.
7 Pinterest SEO Tips to Optimize Your Pins
Before starting with SEO, one must know that Pinterest works a bit differently from traditional search engines. This means that its ranking factors are associated with more engagement metrics and shares.
If you want more traffic to your pins, here are 7 ‘can’t-miss’ SEO for Pinterest tips you should follow.
- Understand the Pinterest Search Engine
Is Pinterest really a search engine? The answer is a wholesome yes! Nearly 522 million people use this app to search for products, shop or take inspiration. It is better if you can put this situation to use to your advantage!
In order to implement SEO for Pinterest strategies in the marketing campaign, you need to understand how the search engine works.
Pinterest’s search engine is a unique element. Since it is an online pinboard of amazing ideas, people surf this app with a specific goal in mind. It focuses on providing search queries with visual-based answers.
The visual search engine attracts the attention of the target audience pretty efficiently. No matter which background you come from, whether you are a doctor or a make-up artist, the search engine is a game-changer for every industry.
Users discover pins through keywords like, “boho canvas painting ideas for home decor” or “steps for a proper Korean skincare routine”. They can also scan an image from the internet and search for it on Pinterest. It is usually done by using advanced machine-learning technology, such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network). That’s how interesting its visual search engine discovery feature is!
The visual search feature leads to enhanced engagement from your target audience. Moreover, the best part is that the pins keep surfacing on the homepage instead of fading away like social media posts. It results in a long shelf-life of pins.
Another observation that is surfacing is that even Google has taken inspiration from the Pinterest board homepage. Before you see the traditional search results, you will come across image-based search results.
They come in the form of ads and videos from different websites. So, it implies the fact that Google has also adopted the visual search technique to display search results like Pinterest.
So, if you have a deep insight into the intricacies of how the search engine works, you will be able to implement your SEO strategies more precisely.
- Start using a Free Pinterest Business Account
When you open a Pinterest Business Account, you get access to the Pinterest business hub. This hub usually comes with two free tools: Pinterest Analytics and Ad Manager.
The Insights tool provides information on the engagement rate of pins from your target audience. The Ads Manager allows you to run free ads on the platform. It helps you create, manage, and track your ad campaign performance precisely.
Having a business account enables you to create boards with rich pins that contain information straight from your official website.
You can either create an account from scratch or convert your personal account into a business account. The choice is yours!
- Optimize your Profile
Now that your business account is set, it’s time to optimize your profile to procure organic traffic. To continue with the process, you have to pay equal attention to all four components of a profile. It includes your profile name, description, username and website.
When you optimize your profile, it sends positive signals to Pinterest regarding the content of your account. This makes it a good Pinterest SEO strategy. All you need to do is set up accurate information about your profile.
For instance, you are an aesthetic canvas painter. This is how you can optimize your profile: You can either use your name or come up with a brand name for your profile. Make sure to choose an SEO-friendly username devoid of any punctuation and spaces. Such as, “ArtGallerybyIsabella” or “Canvas_n_brushstrokes”.
Whatever username you use, make sure to maintain consistency across all online directories. Additionally, your username will also show in the interest profile URL. This will help you build a strong brand awareness.
For your about section, you can elaborate in 500 characters about your profile. Use phrases like “abstract canvas painting,” “customized oil painting,” and “boho artist by choice.” When you use relevant keywords in your “bio section,” it immediately gives the viewers an idea about your profile.
Now, if you are a well-established brand, do not forget to add your official website link to your Pinterest account. If people are genuinely interested in your products, there is a high chance they will look for an official website.
Checklist
- Use relevant keywords in username and bio
- Do not exceed about section beyond 500 words
- Keep your username consistent across all online channels
- The username must be within 3 to 30 characters
- You can create a username with letters, special characters, numbers and underscores
- Highlight USPs in the description
- Claim your Website
You can claim your website by linking it to your Pinterest business account. To do so, add an HTML tag, upload an HTML file, along with the addition of a DNS TXT record.
When you claim your website, it ensures that clicks on pins coming from there are directed to your Pinterest profile. Moreover, it gives you free access to detailed analytical information regarding your pins’ performance and traffic insights.
It implies that you can actually track down how well your pins are performing. Additionally, you can keep a tab on people who take inspiration from your pins to create their Pinterest board.
This Pinterest SEO strategy is useful in gaining more visibility across the platform. As a result, it significantly improves the domain quality of your website.
- Conduct Keyword Research
Pinterest SEO works like traditional search engine optimization, where keywords form the source of a solid foundation. Since Pinterest acts like one of the search engines, it shows results based on the key terms users type on the search bar. Therefore, to get a deep insight into the popular terms and phrases users search for, you need to conduct proper keyword research.
There are millions of keywords available for a particular niche. This does not mean that you will target every one of them. It is also not necessary for each keyword to offer highly favorable results.
Additionally, it is not only you who is targeting a particular keyword, like “haircut styles.” Many well-established brands may also use the same keyword. This keyword will have a higher search volume implying to high competition.
So, for all these purposes, start with analyzing your competitors from your niche. Furthermore, aim for long-tail keywords like “haircut styles for round-face women”, or “haircuts for wavy long hair”. Long-tail specific search terms and phrases have comparatively lower search volume than short-term keywords.
Use the guided search on Pinterest to streamline the focus of your research to find more relevant keywords. After finding the primary keyword, this feature gives you a list of latent semantic indexing keywords.
However, these terms are usually very specific in nature. This makes it easier to create content around them. Also, it hits the spot by resonating with the search intent of Pinterest users. Your pins rank better on Pinterest’s search result pages, thereby leading to more organic traffic to your account.
So, if you aim for this kind of keyword, you will cater to what your target audience is exactly looking for.
Checklist
- Understand the search intent of your target audience
- Use keyword research tools to find popular search terms and phrases from your niche
- Give more focus to long-tail keywords
- Create Rich Pins
Rich Pins are an advanced version of regular pins with extra pizazz. They automatically sync the metadata straight from your website to display it on your pins.
This feature increases user engagement along with offering a smooth user experience. It makes them more actionable, as the main motive of rich pins is to earn clicks from viewers.
Other than being informational in nature, they also improve the quality of the domain. So, if you are running a product page or content creator on Pinterest, you need to have rich pins.
Since Pinterest is a search engine, having rich pins will help your pins rank higher on search results pages. Additionally, the Pinterest algorithm considers rich pins to be a good signal and prefers them over regular ones.
You can avail of this feature after you have set up your business account and claimed your website. Furthermore, the best part about these pins is that if you make any changes, the Pinterest platform automatically updates them.
How do you identify rich pins?
When you click on a pin, if you see some extra information available above and below the image, that’s a rich pin for you.
To enable rich pins, you need metadata on our website. Add rich meta tags to those web pages to ensure the syncing process is smooth. So, the contents with correct meta tags on those pages show as rich pins.
Following this, figure out what kind of rich pin is best suitable for you. Choose any one of the four types: recipe-rich pins, article-rich pins, and product-rich pins.
So, if you are a chef or gastronomy expert, you have to install the recipe-rich pins. Take a look at the picture below.
Checklist
- Write an SEO-friendly meta-description
- Add tags to your site
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Create an engaging title and description for each pin
- Create Relevant Pinterest Boards
If you want to spruce up your SEO game, start by creating relevant Pinterest boards. Be specific in your descriptions when you create a new pin board because the name matters a lot.
Attract the attention of the pinners by using a specific and eye-catching name for your boards. The more generic the name, the higher the chances of getting overlooked by the audience. So, come up with a simple yet specific board name. Mind you, it has to be relevant to your niche.
For instance, if you run a business selling hand-painted room decor items, your board should have a name that includes the primary keyword. Like, “Bedroom Wall Decor Art Ideas” or ” Hand Painting Canvas Ideas for Bedroom Wall Decor”.
This Pinterest SEO strategy makes the work of search engines easier, along with a seamless user experience. The Pinterest app, as well as the viewers, can easily understand the content of the board just by looking at its name.
The game does not end here! After you have set the name, fill the board with relevant pins. The more relevant the pin is, the higher the chances of better ranking on search engine result pages.
However, if you create a pin that aligns with other boards as well, first save it under the most relevant one. The reason is the platform uses the first board’s context to categorize the pins. This helps it to rank them appropriately in the feed. Consequently, it makes your content appear on the screen of the right audience, thereby enhancing your discoverability exponentially.
Checklist
- Board name must not exceed 100 characters
- Include the primary keyword in the first 30 characters to avoid truncation
- Come up with an attractive name
- Avoid clickbait titles
How to optimize Pinterest for Google
Pinterest is a powerful visual search engine that can boost visibility for businesses across many sectors and not just for e-commerce. You can even expand your reach by optimizing your Pinterest presence on Google. Here’s how to leverage Pinterest SEO effectively:
- Use Relevant Keywords in Board Names and Descriptions
Make a list of board titles and descriptions that utilize terms your potential customers will most likely use in their online searches. This way, both Google as well as Pinterest will grasp what you have posted thus increasing its presence in searches. In describing your work, throw in enough details but also keep it short only highlighting the relevant words within your trade or specialized region.
- Optimize Pin Descriptions with Searchable Terms
While making pins, use elaborate descriptions which have pertinent keywords in them. Consider how people would search for your content and conversationally embed them. Do not overindulge in keywords but make sure the information given is descriptive and encompasses some keywords related to the subject of your pin.
- Create High-Quality, Original Images
To please Google and Pinterest, it’s necessary to create unique and quality visuals. Stand out by creating original images that can represent your content more accurately. When using attractive graphics or photographs that would be shared as well as re-pinned they will increase your visibility as well as SEO possibilities.
- Implement Rich Pins
Make your website richer for pins to supply Pinterest and Google with more metadata. Recipe details, product prices or article headings are examples of this supplementary information that would make your pins much more detailed thereby increasing their chances of appearing in the relevant searches.
- Optimize Your Pinterest Profile
Like a little website, your Pinterest profile should be handled accordingly. For instance, use a descriptive profile name and description that are free of jargon and contain relevant words that portray your brand or business. Don’t forget to include a link to your site, also remember to fill out the rest of the fields in your profile with information related to your profession or niche.
- Consistently Pin Fresh Content
Regular participation on Pinterest shows search engines that your profile is up-to-date and valuable. Create a steady pinning routine with a combination of personal content and curated pins from other players in your niche. It keeps the profile alive and increases how much people see it.
- Engage with Other Users
Pinterest users usually engage on the platform via comments, likes and repins of relevant content. This kind of engagement can be used to augment networks and make personal pins more conspicuous. Pins from highly active accounts have greater chances of getting seen on Pinterest and even on Google as well.
- Use Hashtags Strategically
Hashtags on Pinterest may not be as key compared to other sites, but they can still assist in finding things. For people to discover your stuff via Pinterest’s search engine in their description, you have to employ a few relevant targeted hashtags in your pins, which indirectly increases Google visibility.
- Create and Optimize Board Covers
Create captivating designs for board covers that visually demonstrate what they are about. These covers should incorporate text related to the theme of the board as well as keywords. By doing so, you will allow your potential users to grasp your content immediately while also increasing your chances of getting clicks from search results.
- Take Advantage of Pinterest’s SEO Tools
Use the SEO features that are inherent in Pinterest, such as “Guided Search”, to find common search terms in your area of specialization. Optimize your pin and board descriptions based on these insights for the benefit of the users who are looking for such materials on Pinterest.
Leverage Pinterest SEO to Maximize Your Reach
When you use the above-mentioned SEO for Pinterest strategies, you boost its capacity to drive more Pinterest traffic to your account. Additionally, you reach a wider spectrum of your core audience, which increases the chances of a higher click-through rate.
All you need to do is post high-quality rich pins, focus on image optimization along with device compatibility. Moreover, you need to optimize our page speed for enhanced user experience. Once you are done with all these, you are halfway through success.
Additional Resources:
- TikTok SEO Strategies: How to Rank Your Videos Higher
- Instagram SEO: Increase Your Engagement & Followers
- YouTube SEO in 2024: The Complete Guide to Ranking Videos on Top
