Today, I am going to be talking to you about using Search Engine Optimization strategies in Pinterest marketing. 2020 has created a very interesting landscape for business owners, and this is because we no longer have to stay focused on reaching clients in our local geographic area. Because of telehealth and platforms like Zoom, we can really look and start expanding and reaching people nationwide. Pinterest is a fantastic way to go about doing that because you aren’t necessarily going to reach people within your geographic location. Because of the use of Zoom, clients are used to working with people who really could be anywhere. They’re used to getting information from online, rather than going and sitting down with an individual. So 2020 has really created this landscape where even as a small business who really works with individuals locally, you now can really extend that net a lot wider, and Pinterest creates the perfect opportunity to do search engine optimization and reach the folks who are specifically looking for your product, your services, and your expertise. How Pinterest search algorithm works is it looks at four different top things:
- The domain quality
- The pin quality
- The Pinner quality
- The Topic relevance.
Let’s dive into these individually. The first item is domain quality, this is really to ensure that the websites that have pins coming from it are highly ranked in terms of Pinterest, so if you have never pinned before, if you’ve never claimed the website before, anything like that, Pinterest is less likely to show your pins to other users in Pinterest.
So how do you improve your domain quality in the eyes of Pinterest?
How to Increase Domain Quality on Pinterest
Well, the first thing to do is to convert your Pinterest account to a business account. This provides a lot more tools and resources such as the analytics and things like that, so there’s a lot more reason to do this. However, doing this well really just allow you to be more legitimate in the eyes of Pinterest as well. Once you convert your Pinterest account to a business account, you then need to claim your website, so this basically is like adding a verification emblem almost to your website to make sure that Pinterest knows that you are the one who’s actually creating the content on the site and then pinning it. And it’s pretty easy to do, typically, it’s just that HTML file that you load up through your file manager on your website, so you can do this via FTP or just logging into the C-panel of your hosting account, clicking File Manager and then uploading it to the root directory. Click a button on Pinterest, it’ll automatically verify your site.
Claim Website on Pinterest to Increase Pinterest SEO
The next item is, once you claim your website, you then have the opportunity to create Rich Pins, so when you are pinning, make sure that you are creating rich pins. We’ve talked about this in other episodes before, and the process for doing it, but let’s say you’re a dietician or nutritionist and you have posted a recipe on your website. The rich pin, then actually grabs the information from that recipe and showcases it directly on Pinterest. This helps having rich pins and information like this helps your pin to stand apart against others, it also it makes it so that that pin has more engagement in interactions. To increase your domain quality, we also recommend pinning often, so this helps you just create more engaged users, and then also Pinterest does reward people who spend time on their platform.
And then the last thing to increase the domain quality is to pin high quality content. So you want to pin content that will drive people to your website and get more interaction, the more interaction you get, the more Pinterest will recognize your domain. So the second item is the pin quality, so you want to make sure that the quality of your pins is high. The pin quality is really determined by the popularity of your pins and the engagement level of your pins, so you want to make sure when you’re pinning something that you have a nice title, for example, a title that somebody is going to want to click on to learn more, so you can try a lot of different types of titles on there, a lot of different types of image structure on there, but you want to make it so that when somebody sees your pin, they’re probably going to recognize that to you and click the pin because they know that they’re going to find the high quality content on the other side.
Use High-Resolution Photos on Pinterest with Text Overlay
We recommend for these pins to use a high resolution photo to make sure it’s either square or tall, so a two to three ratio is typically good, then use text overlays so that you have the title of the blog post or more compelling the information for why somebody should click it or save it. Then we recommend putting either just text on there that says your website URL or that has your logo on there, and that’s for that brand recognition. And then if you do have some sort of freebie or give away on your site, I also put a little snippet of text about that as well. And so when you do that, you can use variety of different tools. We often use Canva, but there are others out there to create different versions of this pin, and so as you’re pinning all of them, you’ll be able to see which ones are getting more engagement, then start making more that are similar to that.
Pinner Quality to Increase SEO on Pinterest
The next thing is the Pinner quality. Pinterest, again, likes people and accounts that are active on Pinterest, so you wanna make sure that you are active on Pinterest, so we utilize tailwind as a way to make sure that we are pinning and re-pinning other popular pins, and then you also need to create fresh content. On most networks, there’s a variety of different types of users, there are some users that just sit back and launch, there are other users who are creating content, and then there are other users who both create and share content. So that’s the type of user you want to be on Pinterest, and so when you are pinning, you need to make sure that you pin things to correctly categorize boards, and this just shows your audience as well as Pinterest, that you have some sort of strategy and rationale behind the things that you are pinning.
Use Pinterest analytics to determine which pins are trending, then you can create more pins for that blog post, for example, or pin similar pins to it. And so this is something that we highly, highly recommend doing on Pinterest. The next thing is the topic relevance, and so your goal when you are creating a pin should be to have pins that relate to other pins that are being searched for and re-pinned, and then one way to do this is to do a search on Pinterest and see what specific keywords and phrases are coming up, then you can look at pins that are coming up for that. If you find that some of them aren’t really related, that might be a great opportunity to create a blog post and a pin that does directly relate to there.
Increase Your Pinning Topic Relevance on Pinterest
Now, one thing that we recommend doing is having either a similar image, which graphically Pinterest will recognize as being similar, but then also making sure that you’re utilizing the right keywords in your description as well as in the link and the text and everything surrounding the pin, so that Pinterest really sees that your pin is related to that other pin. To find these keywords, again, just make sure that you are utilizing Pinterest search feature and just start typing in items and it will, just like Google’s, it will come up with recommended searches that other people have done and that are popular on the network. Another place to optimize for these keywords is in your business name, your profile, bio, and then also the specific boards and descriptions that you have on Pinterest.
All of these things working together can help you to increase your Pinterest search engine optimization. And because Pinterest is really a visual search engine that we’ve talked about in the past, it can be one of the top, it can quickly turn into one of the top traffic sources for your business as well. So as we close out, I wanted to give just a couple of more ways that you can make your website a little bit more Pinterest-friendly. So after you have claimed your website and enable the Rich Pins on there, make sure every blog post that you write has a variety of different pins loaded into the content and pinnable content, you can then also add a plug and if you’re using WordPress to enable share buttons, so somebody can quickly easily click the Pinterest share button and pin the image.
Consider Adding Prompts in Text to Pin Now and Read Later
You can also even add text near different parts of your content that say something along the lines of “Pin it now for later”, and this is a great way to get other people to pin it because maybe they don’t have time to read a 10,000 word blog post, so by adding these pins within the content, or pictures within the content with “Pin it, save it for later” text report, you’re just reminding people that they can, in fact, click to pin and save the blog post so that they can come back to it later. Additionally, the last thing that I want to also say is, if you have something like an e-commerce store, typically, we always recommend having the product images, the square. Sounds good, right?
If you think in the lens of Pinterest, you might want to actually play around with having those vertical images, so the 2 x 3 ratio, and so these vertical images of your products might potentially help you rank higher on Pinterest, so you have the picture gallery of all the pictures, just try loading them in different size and see if more people start pinning them. This is something that we are starting to play with for our clients who are utilizing Pinterest and have something like a Woo Commerce or Shopify shop.
Thank you so much to tuning in, and I hope that this gives you some insights into how Pinterest can help you drive more traffic to your website, now that 2020 has really opened up the geographic landscape for the people that you can help. I look forward to seeing you next time on The Social Speak Network podcast.
