When Pinterest launched in 2010, it quickly gained popularity as a place to share recipes, craft ideas and decorating tips. Since then, the site has been transformed from a digital bulletin board to a visual search engine, making it an important component of search engine optimization. With a few tweaks, your Pinterest profile can help you drive organic traffic to your website, increasing sales and making it easier to spread the word about your business.
How Pinterest Affects SEO
Is Pinterest good for SEO? The short answer is yes. Because Pinterest has evolved into a digital search engine, it can be a great source of organic traffic if you understand how to use it. One of the biggest reasons Pinterest should be a component of your SEO strategy is because the site has more than 450 million active monthly users. If even a tiny percentage of these users see one of your pins, you have the opportunity to drive more traffic to your website than ever before.
Another reason Pinterest is good for SEO is that many users are already primed to buy something or request more information about a product or service. If these users see your pins, they’re more likely to visit your website than a search engine user who doesn’t want to buy anything or isn’t sure what they want to do. You can take advantage of their intent by incorporating buyer keywords into your pins and descriptions. A buyer keyword is a specific word or phrase that someone uses when they want to buy a product or service.
Finally, Pinterest provides an important opportunity that other social networks don’t: the ability to create product pins. When you write a Facebook post, you can mention your products and services, but there’s no way to create individual product pages and promote them to other Facebook users. Product pins allow merchants to highlight their products, making it easier to convert Pinterest views into sales. In some cases, it’s even possible for customers to purchase products without leaving the Pinterest website, eliminating an extra step in the purchase process and making it more likely the user will complete the transaction.
Improving SEO With Pinterest
Now that you understand how Pinterest affects SEO, it’s time to create an account. It’s best to register as a business so you can access Pinterest’s scheduling, advertising and analytics tools. When it’s time to choose a user name, the decision you make can have a big effect on your SEO results. It may be tempting to choose something clever or quirky, but you should create a user name based on the needs of your target audience.
If you’re promoting a cookbook, for example, you may want to include a keyword like “chicken recipes” or “slow cooker meals” to help people understand what your content is about. Including a relevant keyword can also help drive traffic to your profile, making your Pinterest SEO strategy even more effective.
Setting up a Pinterest Profile
After you create your account, it’s time to write an attention-getting profile optimized with relevant keywords. For best results, your company logo and any other images you use should have the same logo, colour scheme and other elements as the photos on your website and other social media profiles. Using the same design elements across all platforms ensures customers know what to expect from your brand.
The profile header should contain your formal business name, but there’s a trick you can use to make this headline more effective for SEO. After your company name, add a vertical bar (the | character) followed by a keyword related to what you do. If you operate a plus-size boutique, for example, your profile headline will be more effective for SEO if it reads “Daisy’s Boutique | Stylish Clothing for Plus-Size Women” instead of just “Daisy’s Boutique.”
Conducting Keyword Research
General keyword research software isn’t as effective for Pinterest optimization as it is for identifying relevant keywords for your website. Fortunately, Pinterest has built-in tools to help you understand what kind of information Pinterest users want to find. For example, the Guided Search tool is similar to Google’s autocomplete feature, which makes keyword suggestions based on what you type into the search bar. A search for “sofa” brings up suggestions like “sofa set designs,” “sofa table decor” and “sofa design living rooms.”
You can also use Pinterest topics to identify keywords that are relevant to your audience members. When you look at the category page, it lists more than 30 topics, from art to women’s fashion. Click your desired category to look at some of the most popular pins; you can get keyword ideas from the subtopics and pin titles. The wedding category, for example, has subtopics for wedding decorations, bridal party attire, wedding cakes and wedding flowers. Within the wedding decorations subtopic, you’ll find pins focused on gold wedding tablescapes, affordable wedding favors, wedding photo display ideas and rooftop wedding ideas, all of which make great keywords.
Verifying Your Website
Claiming your website can help you take advantage of additional SEO benefits. In addition to giving you access to Pinterest analytics, verifying your site also ensures your profile photo appears with the pins that come from your site. Once you’re a verified merchant, a blue checkmark will appear next to the website URL in your profile, increasing trust and making Pinterest users feel more comfortable clicking a link to your site or buying one of your products and services.
Pinterest Marketing Tips to Improve Your SEO
Once you set up your profile and determine which keywords to target, how you use Pinterest can make or break your SEO strategy. Following these tips can help you drive organic traffic to your website and bring positive attention to your business.
Pin Frequency
Pinterest isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it platform. For best results, you should be pinning several times per day, as every pin represents a new opportunity to connect with a potential customer. It’s natural to be concerned about pinning too much, but remember that Pinterest is very different from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. You won’t be overwhelming potential customers by posting multiple pins per day. Try to space out your pins so you have a steady flow of new content, rather than a quick burst of content that users may forget about within a few hours.
Keywords in Descriptions
Pin Descriptions
When you create a pin, you have an opportunity to write a description that captures attention and helps optimize your content for the search engines. Fortunately, Pinterest allows you to write several sentences, making it easier to incorporate relevant keywords and help users understand what your pins are all about.
First and foremost, your description should be aimed at helping readers. Keywords are important, but they aren’t helpful if they make it difficult for people to understand what you’re trying to say. Your description should also be written in a positive tone. You don’t want potential customers to think you have a negative outlook or spend your time bashing people online. Every pin description should contain the following:
- Your brand name, preferably in the first sentence
- Keywords that relate to the pin or board content
- Valuable information about the topic
- A request for the reader to do something (click, read, learn, etc.)
As with any other type of content you write, your descriptions should be free of typos, spelling mistakes and grammar errors. If proofreading is one of your weak areas, have an employee or a trusted friend review each description before you publish it.
Board Descriptions
Pinterest also allows you to write a description for each board you create. These descriptions appear just below your profile picture when someone views one of your boards, so they’re prime real estate. Each board description should contain some of the same information as your pin descriptions: your brand name, relevant keywords and a clear explanation of the content.
You should also describe your target audience by explaining who’ll benefit from viewing the pins on your boards. If you run a budgeting website, for example, the description for your meal planning board might be aimed at busy moms who want to spend no more than $2 per serving on each family meal.
Content Quality
Keyword-rich pin and board descriptions are great, but they can only get you so far. You need to focus on writing high-quality content on Pinterest, on your website and on your other social media profiles. If a user clicks a Pinterest link and ends up on a page lacking substance, they may not trust you enough to buy from you. Publishing quality content can also help you reduce your bounce rate—the percentage of people who land on one of your pages and leave without viewing other pages on the site—improving your search engine rankings.
As always, it’s important to meet the needs of your audience members. Not all visitors prefer the same types of content, so try to publish a mix of blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, reports and e-books. If you don’t have a professional writer on staff, hire an experienced writer or editor to write content or review your drafts. Taking this extra step can help you position your brand as one that always puts its audience members first.
Is Pinterest Good for SEO? Best Practices to Follow
Like any other endeavour, Pinterest is most effective when you follow established best practices. These practices can help you improve your search engine rankings, position yourself as an expert in your industry and better meet the needs of your audience.
Image Orientation
Something as simple as image orientation can make a big difference in how people perceive your pins. That’s why you should use vertical images. Otherwise, the image may get cut off, making it difficult for Pinterest users to see what you were trying to share.
Business Logos
Pinterest is an essential component of your branding strategy, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to share your brand image with users. Add your business logo to every pin so audience members start to associate your brand with your content. Just be careful not to put it in the bottom right corner of a pin; this is where Pinterest puts its product icons.
Linking Practices
The purpose of using Pinterest for SEO is to drive organic traffic to your website. To do this, you must make sure the content on your linked pages matches the content on your website pages. Imagine if you were using Pinterest, clicked a link on a pin about the best shoes for flat feet and ended up on a page about holiday decorations. You’d probably be confused, and you might even get annoyed with the pin creator for sending you on a wild goose chase. Make sure the links you include in each pin are highly relevant to the reader’s intent.
Using Pinterest to Your Advantage
Pinterest has made it much easier for business owners to compete with large corporations when it comes to building their audiences and driving organic traffic to their websites. Pinterest can also help you build trust with audience members, making them more likely to buy from you.
If you have a small marketing team, it can be difficult to find time to create several new pins each day and update them as needed. The expert freelance writers at Crowd Content can help. We provide a variety of writing services, from creating social media posts to helping business owners improve their search engine rankings with quality content. Crowd Content also has subject matter experts to help you with keyword research or fact-check your content before you publish it.
