In the fiercely competitive landscape of online lifestyle and e-commerce brands, where promoting numerous products puts you in direct competition with retail giants like Amazon and Walmart, small businesses often face a daunting challenge. Enter SEO for Pinterest, an underrated yet effective strategy that empowers consumer brands to connect with customers and boost revenue through social selling.
Why Pinterest?
Though underrated next to TikTok or Instagram, Pinterest has 465 million active monthly users. Women comprise 60% of the audience, but men and Gen Z are fast-growing segments. 80% of weekly “Pinners” have discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest, making it a prime place for passive and active shoppers.
What is Pinterest SEO?
Beginner Tips for Pinterest SEO
Advanced Tips for Pinterest SEO
Pinterest: The Underrated Platform to Drive Traffic and Social Sales
Pinterest SEO is the process of optimizing your content to make it discoverable on the platform. Most people associate SEO (search engine optimization) with Google search. The truth is, there are two ways you can optimize your Pinterest content for discoverability: first, on search engines and also on Pinterest. Fortunately, I’ll show you many tactics and best practices to boost visibility in both places.
With search engines, you use traditional SEO techniques to optimize your page titles, descriptions, and images to boost your content’s rankings in Google search, including Google Shopping and Google Images.
In the second, which I like to call social engine optimization, you implement practices to give your content a better chance of appearing on Pinterest. This is smart because consumers are shifting their behavior to shop within social media platforms — skipping the search engine altogether.
What is social selling?
Social selling is the practice of marketing and selling goods and services directly on social media platforms. 36% of Gen Z and 22% of millennials search for brands on social media more often than through search engines. And this is translating into sales: One in five Gen Z, Millennial, and Gen X social media users bought a product directly in a social media app in the past three months.
10 Beginner Tips for Pinterest SEO
Research your top keywords. Landing content in front of your ideal customer is challenging unless you know what they’re searching for. 97% of the top Pinterest searches are unbranded, which means you need to use keywords other than your brand name. To compete on SEO, research which keywords your audience uses to browse online. First, make a list of keywords used in your business. Then, use a keyword research tool to see how much search volume those have and look for related ideas. You can start with free tools like Keyword Surfer or Google Ads Keyword Planner. For more tips, check out HubSpot’s keyword research for beginners guide and competitor research tutorial.
Set up a business account. You can’t use a personal account to set up your Pinterest content for commerce. Instead, create a business account that’s linked to a personal account. A business account gives you access to the Pinterest Business Hub and Pinterest Analytics (more on measurement later).
Verify and link your website. After registering, you can take a few more steps to authenticate your business. First, claim your website to access analytics and other features. Register as a merchant if you intend to sell on Pinterest and connect your store catalog for pinning and advertising. Registered merchants can access advanced features like tagging products in a lifestyle photo.
Optimize your company name and username. To optimize your Pinterest business account for search, you should first choose a recognizable company name and username. Your company name has no character limit, but the challenge often comes with your username, which is limited to 30 characters. Lesser-known brands or solopreneurs can find success by adding keywords after their name, like “Sara Smith | Interior Designer, Stager, and Home Decorator.” If your business name doesn’t fit or is cumbersome for the username, choose something memorable, keyword-conscious, and easy to spell that is also clearly associated with your business. Some examples include @KateSpadeNY for Kate Spade New York, @makeupdotcom for Makeup.com by L’Oreal, and @bhg for Better Homes & Gardens.
Optimize your page’s about section. The Pinterest About section provides 500 prime keyword real estate characters, so use this space wisely. In addition to being descriptive and keyword-sensitive, your bio should be simple, concise, and specific. Five hundred characters is plenty of space for a keyword-rich overview that covers the who, what, and where of what you do, so use it smartly — and don’t forget to add your website URL in the space provided. Take a look at the example above from Vessi sneakers.
Include keywords in pin titles. Your pin title is one of the most significant opportunities for text-based content on Pinterest. You have 100 characters to play with here, but Pinners will usually only see the first 40. Take this example from the outdoors brand REI. They cleverly use an excellent title (“best hammocks”), matching the search phrasing people use.
Write killer pin descriptions Another goldmine for Pinterest SEO is your pin description. When describing your pins, include terms that your audience will relate to and use on their own, add links to the original product or content, and consider adding instructions on product usage or care. Be sure to include the brand name in the first line. Descriptive terms like “new” and relevant keywords in the preview area can also drive more clicks. Pinterest gives you 500 characters to work with, but take caution that Pinners typically only see the first 50 as a preview. Make the start of your pin description irresistible if you want them to read it all. Even when they don’t, the keywords will still help to signal your pin’s relevance to their algorithm. Don’t try anything gimmicky, like repeating keywords or linking to irrelevant content. Instead, focus on creating remarkable descriptions that help you stand out.
Include a call to action. Verbs like “discover,” “sign up,” or “save for later” can boost engagement with your pins. Pinterest recommends including a CTA in your pin description or title for users to share your pin or follow your board. After all, the more engagement your pins and profile receive, the more your content will populate across the site.
Create descriptive Pinterest boards. On Pinterest, you shouldn’t just be pinning your content — you should also be curating it. Creating boards around common search topics important to your audience can make your boards (and your products within them) easy to find. You can boost visibility and engagement by updating timely boards with a mix of your own and others’ content.
Pin content consistently. The more high-quality pins you create, the more likely the platform will display your content across feeds and searches. When one of your pins does well, it signals to the algorithm that similar content from your profile may also do well and can boost your older pins. Pinterest recommends publishing content at least weekly to keep your account fresh.
10 Advanced Tips for Pinterest SEO
If you’ve aced all the beginner tips, let’s move on to more advanced tactics. Some of these are more technical, but they won’t take much time to manage once they’re set up.
Optimize for visual search. Pinterest is a visual search engine where people can browse, discover, and shop by image. With that in mind, you must change your approach to match how Pinners primarily experience the platform. They come to use their right brain and look, not read. The quality of your images matters far more than your descriptions or formatting. However, these tactics will give your beautiful images a boost and get them discovered by the right people.
Include alt text for your images. Alt text is a text description that you can add to your images to help people with visual impairments understand what’s in the image. Pinterest also uses your alt text to understand the context around your pin. Alt text can also help boost your pin’s position in search results and potentially improve your accessibility.
Use hashtags. Pinterest has supported hashtags for a while now. When you add a hashtag to a pin, it causes a big jump in the pin’s performance and reach on Pinterest. As a best practice, include one or two hashtags in your pin. Use relevant and niche-specific hashtags to your post. Make sure the hashtag relates to the post content and is accurate and don’t add too many hashtags to your pin. That’s because pinners are very selective about which hashtags they use to find new content.
Use Rich Snippets. Rich Pins are a type of enhanced pins that make your cool ideas stand out by proving additional metadata about a picture, article DIY, or recipe idea. Adding this extra information sure does provide more value to your images, particularly when you want Pinterest to recognize the type of content and categorize your pins. All this information becomes crucial when you aim to earn rankings and visibility on Pinterest.
Use Pincodes for offline promotion. Your Pinterest profile isn’t just for online marketing and selling. Using Pinterest’s new Pincodes feature, businesses can create personalized codes that can be scanned by any Pinterest app. When scanned, the code automatically turns into a Pin of your choosing or takes the user to your business’s profile. This makes it easy for people to engage and discover your business based on its real-world location.
Participate in group boards. Group boards are a team of contributors providing their pin content to a single board. Participation in the group board leads to increasing the followers. You can network with people in the same niche and then contribute to boards because it leverages the audience of the other contributors and results in more engagement.
Engage with your audience and other pinners. The more people engage with your pins, the higher the number of people it reaches. Make sure to communicate with your audience by responding to their pins or reaching out to influencers to come up with forums where you can share your brand content.
Use Pinterest Analytics. Pinterest Analytics is a tool that helps to measure, analyze, and report on traffic statistically tracked from Pinterest. It’s essential to track these metrics to measure and understand the effectiveness of your pins at driving engagement, traffic, and sales. Pinterest Analytics will assist you in gaining insight into the kind of people who engage with non-paid, organic content.
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