10 Pinterest SEO Tips to Get More Traffic from Your Pins

Intro

Pinterest is a great platform for driving traffic that many website owners and marketers overlook. In fact, according to Hootsuite, it's the 14th largest social network with 431 million monthly active users.

What this means is that you can create pins on Pinterest, whether an image, video, or product, to share ideas, provide tutorials, or sell your products and reach lots of people worldwide. Although the platform is known to work better for specific niches, especially those with visually appealing content such as fashion, home decor, and travel, it has grown to accommodate numerous other industries.

If you want to increase the traffic that your pins generate and make money from Pinterest, you need to follow some Pinterest SEO tips. This guide covers some of the best Pinterest optimization strategies to grow your business!

What Is Pinterest SEO?

Pinterest SEO is the process of optimizing your pins and profile to increase visibility in search results, reach more people, drive traffic back to your website, and eventually make more money. Remember, Pinterest works like a search engine but for images and videos.

So, the difference between Pinterest and Google is that you'll be optimizing a pin rather than the content for your blog or site. However, you need quality landing pages to ensure the traffic you get converts.

Pinterest SEO Tips for More Traffic

Below, you'll find the best Pinterest SEO strategies for maximizing traffic from the platform.

1. Set up Pinterest for Business

The first step is to create a new Pinterest business account. Other than that, you're free to switch from a personal account to a business one if you don't want to start from the ground up again.

This will give you access to useful analytics and insights from the platform, such as how pins are performing, who's engaging with them, and more. Plus, it allows you to set up rich pins that include extra information about your product or service. If you'll ever want to run ads, you need your business account for that too.

2. Make Your Profile SEO-Friendly

Your profile is what will help you get found on Pinterest. That's why it's crucial to pay attention to it.

• Choose a good username: Your Pinterest business page should have an SEO-friendly name. You can achieve this by including your niche after the actual business name and separating them with a hyphen.
• Optimize the about section: Your profile should be descriptive and include keywords that describe your business. This way, people searching for help with their problems will find you if the words you used are relevant to their queries.
• Connect your website: It's important to add your website to your profile so that people can explore more content on your blog or check products on your online store. You'll need to claim the domain and verify ownership by uploading an HTML file to it or adding a DNS text record to the host.
• Add a brand logo: You're free to use your own photo or upload a perfectly-designed logo of your business, depending on what works best for you.

Now, here's a good example of a Pinterest business profile with all these elements:

(Image source)

As you can see, the niche is personal finance and the brand has included all important main keywords in the page name and description.

3. Create One or a Few Boards with SEO in Mind

You'll need boards on Pinterest because they're used for grouping your pins. So, a pin of a specific category will go to a particular board. This way, people can easily identify the pins they're looking for based on their interests.

Let's say you have a recipe blog. You could create some boards with names like breakfast recipes, appetizers, main dishes, beverages, or fruits. As another example, an online fashion store may have boards such as casual wear, vintage clothing, kid's fashion, streetwear, or swimwear. Or, if you’re blogging about work-from-home jobs, some great board names to use would be freelancing jobs, remote work, or blogging guides, depending on the post categories on your site.

It's essential to pick names that people can easily think of and type into the search bar on Pinterest. You can use Pinterest's suggestions from searches to find out how to name your boards. Be sure to include relevant words and phrases in the board descriptions too.

4. Join Group Boards

Group boards on Pinterest are those where multiple people can collaborate and pin their content. They're great for increasing your reach since members can save your pins on their own boards as well as other boards you didn't know of. That's why you should always try to join as many relevant group boards as possible.

Usually, Pinterest group boards are niche-specific. It becomes easier to target an audience based on the industry you're in. But there are also broad group boards that allow you to post any pin.

Keep in mind that boards have rules that you need to follow. Failing to do so or being spammy may result in being kicked out of it by the owner.

5. Follow Other Accounts in Your Niche

Following other pinners and businesses will help you build relationships in your industry. This should be part of your Pinterest SEO strategy because when someone sees that your account is active, they'll be more likely to follow you as well. These are the pinners whose pins will most likely appear when you log into your Pinterest business account.

So, it's also a good way to also steal some ideas from your competitors. This applies to not only pin ideas but also content for your blog. Who knows, their strategy may also work in your favor if you implement it!

6. Publish High-Quality Pin Designs

The first step to enticing people to click on your pins is to design visually appealing images and even videos. The content you use in your designs should also be relevant to the landing page you'll link to from your pin. Even if you follow all the other Pinterest SEO tips but have poorly-designed pins, few people will want to click on them and that will be a loss for you and your business.

We'll discuss the best image pin design practices for SEO below.

• Choose the right pin-designing tool: A proper graphic design app can help you come up with quality designs in no time. While free tools can be amazing, you can opt for a paid subscription to get all the features without any limits. One example is Canva, which has custom pin templates to use.
• Select a proper image size and format: According to Pinterest, static pins of the ratio 2:3 or 1,000x 1,500 px work well on the platform. The PNG format tends to show more detail. But Pinterest also allows JPEG pins for images.
• Use bright pin colors: It's best to use a light background rather than dark ones when it comes to pins. For texts, you can pair both light and dark font colors.
• Play with fonts: Don't just use one boring font for your pin design. Include both formal and script fonts to have a bold as well as artistic look.
• Brand your pins: It's important for people to know that a pin belongs to you. So, you can add a logo or website address to them. Even if a pin appears elsewhere, people will be able to know about your brand.

Check this pin example:

(Image Source)

The above pin follows the best practices when it comes to pin design, having a light background to accompany the dark text. There’s also more than one font used in the pin and a brand name at the bottom. Someone interested in the topic is likely to click on it.

7. Be Strategic with Keywords for Pins

Just like Google SEO, Pinterest SEO also requires keyword research and optimization. Your pins should include keywords relevant to the topic, as this will help more people find them.

You can use Pinterest's search bar to get ideas for relevant keywords and phrases you should include in your pin titles and descriptions. This will help the platform show your pins to more people searching for such content.

You can also use Pinterest Analytics or a third-party tool like Tailwind or Ahrefs to find out what terms are popular in your niche. Another strategy is to check the keywords used by your competitors and create pins with those phrases too.

But don't stuff your pin title or description names with irrelevant words to make them look more searchable. This can have a negative effect on Pinterest SEO since the platform can detect such practices.

And, don't forget the hashtags! Although Pinterest no longer recommends them because of abuse by spammers, adding relevant hashtags to pins can help your brand appear more in searches.

8. Use Video Pins

Pinterest is a visual platform. So, besides images, you also need to have video pins in your Pinterest SEO strategy. You can simply create them using a pin-designing tool, except that you'll be using a short video and not an image.

Also, there are idea pins that allow you to upload several pins as one post. You can have a video or combine several images to make a quick video in this case.

Video pins come with analytics such as video views and average play time where you can know how much people find the content interesting. As long as the video relates to whatever you're promoting, you'll most likely get some clicks from users that come across it.

9. Repin Content on Pinterest

Don't just limit yourself to pinning your own content. You can benefit more by saving other people's pins as long as they fit into any of your boards.

If you repin something, the pinner may return the favor and also do the same for you.

This way, your pin will also appear among their followers and you get more reach.

Also, this can be a strategy to get more followers if you don't have a lot of pins yourself. If you're just starting out and haven't yet gotten the hang of Pinterest, you can simply post other people's content as saved pins on your page to keep your account active.

10. Install the Pinterest Tag

The Pinterest Tag is a piece of code that you install on your website's pages. It doesn't directly influence the number of website visits and page views you can get. But it's useful for tracking conversions as a result of the traffic that comes from your pins to your website or landing page. This way, you'll be able to understand how effective your Pinterest SEO strategy is.

You specifically need to have the tag if you plan to use Pinterest ads. They can do magic for you if you have an e-commerce store and need to boost sales. It becomes simpler to know the performance of your ad campaigns so you can know what works and make tweaks as needed.

Wrapping It up

With these Pinterest SEO tips, you can get more traffic from the platform and increase conversions. Remember to use relevant keywords that relate to your brand and niche. And don't forget to be consistent in creating and pinning content on a regular basis if you want to gain followers and make your pins appear more on Pinterest search results.