Pinterest is a dominant yet highly underrated platform used for traffic generation for bloggers and businesses. While often associated with recipe articles, DIY how-tos, and travel blogs, Pinterest is a powerful search engine that covers a wide range of topics and is a significant driver of organic traffic across many industries.

According to Statista, Pinterest has over 442 million active users monthly thus, presenting an untapped opportunity for business owners, digital marketers, and SEO professionals looking to boost their traffic numbers.

Although it differs from Google and other SEO-friendly search engines, the SEO operational strategy is the same.

What is Pinterest SEO?

Pinterest SEO involves optimizing your Pinterest profile and website in order to generate more organic or paid traffic from the Pinterest platform. It uses target “keywords” to optimize users’ profiles. Additionally, the ranking factors on Pinterest relate more to engagement metrics and social shares than backlinks and technical SEO.

There are four main factors that influence Pinterest SEO:

• Domain quality: This refers to your website’s quality. Knowing how many items were pinned from your site, Pinterest ranks you with that metric. Hence, to benefit ensure to pin consistently, enable rich pins on your account, and create engaging high-quality content.
• Pin quality: Pinterest tracks all instances of your pin. From its freshness to popularity, and the rate of engagement. Creating appealing graphics and stimulating content greatly improves your pin quality.
• Pinner quality: Your overall quality as a content creator and pinner is evaluated by Pinterest. This is measured by the frequency of your activity and the public reception of your content. Consequently, your pinner quality can be enhanced by being active, sharing popular content, increasing saves, and engaging with followers.
• Topic relevance: This generally refers to keywords. Similar to the way Google functions, keywords affect what appears in Pinterest search.

Pinterest SEO for E-commerce Website

Users’ online shopping experience is enhanced by Pinterest because it makes it easy to search for products, making it an ideal platform for e-commerce sites. Also, this can encourage interactivity on your website, and keep your customers engaged with your brand across the digital landscape. Plus, when you have the Pinterest tag in place, you can leverage the data to create targeted advertising campaigns.

How to Setup a Pinterest Business Account

If your goal is to sell on Pinterest, set up a Pinterest Business Account, which comes with an array of personalized support, creative strategies, and campaign guidance. Also, a business account gives you access to Pinterest analytics and ads manager. As you add more content to your account, you’ll be able to collect data on views and engagement.

When creating a Pinterest business account, the following is important:

• Choose an SEO-friendly username
• Optimize your profile by filling the “about you” section with relevant details and keywords which will make it easier for people to locate and save your Pins.
• Create at least one board with a catchy title.

As with many other platforms, you can take data from your website to feed more targeted Pinterest campaigns. It’s critical to optimize your website for Pinterest users by:

• Adding the Pinterest tag to your website to track conversions, segment your audience and give a reliable report on your profile’s performance.
• Verifying your site will add your profile picture to all of your Pins.
• Adding the save button which allows you to increase the reach of your campaigns beyond Pinterest.
• Adding share buttons to your product pages. This encourages visitors to follow you on Pinterest and share your products with their networks.

Pinterest Ad Formats

Pinterest offers a variety of ad format options for every goal. Here are some worth exploring:

• Standard: Vertical or square image
• Video
• Shopping: Buyable pins allow users to buy instantly
• Carousel: Users can swipe or scroll through multiple images in one pin
• Collections: Mix lifestyle photos with product images in this ad format.

6 Pinterest Best Practices for High-Traffic Success

To succeed on this platform, you first need to determine what Pinterest means for your business – how it fits into your wider marketing strategy and set appropriate goals. Applying the following SEO tips will optimize your profile, increase clicks, and drive traffic to your website.

1. Aim for Engagement

While other factors are important in making your Pinterest platform SEO-friendly, user engagement and experience (UX) is super important. This is due to the fact that more engagement can increase your Pin’s (and your profile’s) visibility in search, increasing your traffic, and, inevitably, your website conversions.

To improve your engagement and increase your search visibility, you can link your Pinterest account to your other social media accounts, include text as an overlay on your images and invite relevant Pinterest influencers to collaborate on a board to grow your own following. Relatedly, Pin on a Consistent Basis (at least 5 times per day); Follow relevant boards to grow your network, and Track your performance with Pinterest analytics.

2. Set Traffic & Conversion Goals for Your Business

Keep in mind that lead times on Pinterest can be much longer than you’re used to on Google or Facebook. A significant amount of data can be gathered by simply following your traffic numbers and seeing what’s already working for your profile. Relatedly, it is important you avoid openly pushing ads or commercial messages until you’ve earned the trust of both Pinterest and your audience.

Source: Pinterest

With Pinterest, slow and steady often wins the race. If you’re looking to scale your performance on Pinterest, look into creating conversion campaigns and optimizing your lead generation strategies.

3. Conduct Keyword Research

Since Pinterest is a search engine, its “feeds” are curated based on what a user is searching for and how those key terms are used in the Pins being shared by content creators. Therefore, to uncover the right keywords for your Pins and boards, the use of guided search is recommended. This helps users narrow their focus and find more relevant results.

Source: Pinterest

Also, it is important to test out promoted pins. Similar to the use of AdWords by SEO professionals to gauge the performance of certain keywords, it recommended your best-performing keywords on Google and use Promoted Pins to see if they’ll succeed on Pinterest.

4. Organize & Optimize Boards

Since boards provide a great opportunity for Pinterest’s search engine algorithm to know how you categorize your products and/or organize your content, consumer and keyword research for Pinterest should be the primary focus when creating boards.

Although keyword optimization and board cover images are important parts of Pinterest SEO and engagement, boards need to be populated with high-quality Pins if you want to gain popularity.

5. Know the Anatomy of a Pin

To stay with the trend and keep your viewers engaged, your Pin should be appealing and compelling. Consequently, when it comes to creating SEO-friendly Pins, the following are clear rules of thumb: Optimal Pin size is 1,000px by 1,500px, or a ratio of 2:3 (particularly important on mobile); Use of eye-catching colors; Include enticing, keyword-rich titles – like “10 SEO Hacks for Make Money Online,” not “Tips for making money online” or something equally generic.

6. Be Descriptive

A Proper description gives users a preview of what your content is about and could be the deciding factor in encouraging them to click through to your site. As with your titles, it’s important to get descriptions right for SEO on Pinterest because detailed descriptions with target words help Pinterest locate and display your images during relevant searches.

Conclusion

While Pinterest SEO may seem challenging, its navigation is simple once you get familiar with the mode of operation. If you’re looking for a proven method of driving brand awareness as well as website traffic, Pinterest is worth exploring.

Also, Pinterest SEO algorithms like Google and other search engine SEO algorithms are on a steady change, so you’ll want to stay on top of current trends and monitor your analytics to fine-tune your personalized SEO strategy to reach the over 400 million visitors per month.