Pinterest SEO Tips for 2022
Pinterest is an incredibly powerful tool for promoting your business online. So how do you make it do the work for you? There are some simple Pinterest SEO tips that will help you to get your exposure to the next level by helping Pinterest to promote your content for you!
What is SEO?
Unlike other social media platforms, which work as spaces for content to be shared, Pinterest is a search engine. It has millions of Pins it could bring up in response to a search. Like Google, it uses algorithms that analyze the content of a Pin or post to decide if and when to show the post to people.
For example, if you Google ‘wedding venues in NYC’ you don’t want to be shown wedding venues in Houston. An algorithm filters out the content that isn’t relevant to your search. Making your content relevant to what people are searching for is what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about.
Pinterest SEO helps Pinterest to understand what your Pin is about so that the algorithm promotes your content. When you’ve cracked your SEO strategy, Pinterest’s 400-million-strong pool of potential leads is open to you, and you will be generating traffic to your website! You can see how Pinterest offers the potential for a huge potential return on investment.
We’ve broken down our Pinterest SEO tips into four main categories:
Pinterest SEO Tips for Your Account Profile
When the Pinterest algorithm determines how to show your Pin, the overall rating of your account factors in. All of the Pinterest SEO tips below will help you to improve the rating of your account, which in turn will help the ranking of each of your posts.
Make sure you have a business account
Having a business account allows you to access analytics. Make sure that you have claimed your site on Pinterest, too, so that your business icon appears on all your posts.
Use keywords in your name and biofield
Another Pinterest SEO tip is to use all 60 characters you have in your ‘Name’ field to use relevant keywords that refer to the overall purpose of your account. You also get 160 characters in your Pinterest bio, which is a great place to pack full of keywords - more on them later.
Pin and re-Pin regularly
Aim to be active on Pinterest every day - Pinterest rewards accounts that are viewed as active and consistent. For best Pinterest SEO results, this doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) be only posting your own Pins - repin relevant content to your boards, too.
Scheduling services like Tailwind can make posting every day super easy!
Interact strategically
An important element of Pinterest is the ‘Smartfeed algorithm’. You know the homepage on Pinterest where you can see a bunch of recommended Pins? The smart feed algorithm determines what appears there. They use a bunch of different factors, but effectively they want to show people more of the type of content they’ve already liked and interacted with - so they will choose Pins that appear similar.
Each Pin is chosen partially in response to Pinterest’s score of the quality of the individual Pin (more on how to make great, SEO-friendly Pins below), and partly in response to how Pinterest has categorized your account. Remember, the algorithms are designed with relevance in mind. So, for example, if someone has repinned a lot of knitting Pins, Pinterest will want to populate their smart feed with more knitting content. If you have never repinned anything to do with knitting, created any knitting content yourself, or used keywords related to knitting - you might have one single brilliant knitting Pin, but it will never show up in any smart feed home pages because Pinterest won’t categorize you as a knitting account.
Effectively, the people who see your Pins on their smart feed homepage are partially determined by who YOU interact with on Pinterest. So make sure that you are interacting with Pins that are similar to your own, and that you are engaging with the kind of content you are producing. Make sure that the names and content of your Boards and the Pins you like and repin are all relevant to the niche you are hoping to break into.
Pinterest SEO Tips for Your Website
It might feel counterintuitive to start improving Pinterest SEO by working on another website, but actually, because each Pin is linked back to a website, it’s extremely relevant. One of the things Pinterest uses to score individual Pins is its rating of the domain each Pin links back to. Pinterest determines this through the amount of interaction that content from your blog gets on Pinterest. Blogging is a great way to create content for your page and to make sure that the webpage you are linking back to on your Pins is actually relevant to the content of your Pin - linking to a generic online store or ‘About’ page will not give your Pin the best score; it’s far better for the Pinterest SEO if you make sure the landing page your Pin links to uses similar language to the Pin itself.
One way to up the amount of interaction your blog or website gets on Pinterest is to get the ‘Pin It’ button embedded into your website so that anyone can immediately turn images from your website into Pins that link back to you.
Pro tip: When posting the description of your Pin, don’t just use the alt-text box. Rather, use the “data-pin-description” tag which Pinterest uses to make the description of the new Pin when people Pin from your website. This makes the Pin easier for Pinterest to ‘read’ and score.
Pinterest SEO Tips for Your Pins
All good SEO tips boil down to one key principle: clearly communicating what your Pin is about. This will help your Pins do well because clear messaging is important for the sake of Pinterest users and the Pinterest algorithm alike.
This brings us to your new best friend: keywords.
Keywords are the words and phrases that a) identify your Pin content (e.g., ‘gluten-free oatmeal cookies’ or ‘Baltimore wedding photographers’) and b) are what your target audience is searching for. Remember, Pinterest is a search engine - keywords help Pinterest match people’s interests and searches to your Pins.
Finding the right keywords
Start simple and begin to brainstorm what your target audience is searching on Pinterest and Google. Then type some of these into the Pinterest search bar and look at the autofill, recommended phrases - these will show you what the popular searches on this topic are.
Another helpful Pinterest SEO Top is to go onto Pinterest Ads as if you were creating a new ad. You will be able to put keywords into a search bar here and Pinterest will show you the search volume for each keyword - look for the ones that have a high volume and have been searched for a lot.
Now create a master list of the keywords you are aiming to use. You don’t have to use everyone in every Pin, but it is good to know what keywords you will use for each topic.
Make sure your list has variety, from overarching ones like ‘Wedding venues’ to gradually more specific, ‘longtail’ ones like ‘Outdoor wedding venues for boho weddings in Sacramento.’
Longtail keywords are phrases instead of individual words, and they are important because the longer and more specific a keyword gets, the less competition there is. Plus, when keywords get super specific like that, it is more likely to be people with specific intent who are searching for them, which means they are more likely to take action.
Using your keywords
Once you’ve got your keywords, where do you use them?
In the Pin description - you can go up to 500 characters here, but use at least 100 characters to describe what the Pin is about using keywords.
In the Pin title
In hashtags - Pinterest users can filter on hashtags, so search for the kind of hashtags you think people will use to find content like yours. Use a few relevant hashtags, maybe 2-3, and hashtag your name or website to help people find all your posts
Visual Pinterest SEO tips for your Pins
One pretty cool element of the Pinterest algorithm is that it can ‘read’ or analyze images to see how well it matches the description and the website it is linking back to. One of our Pinterest SEO tips is that the best images use text overlay to communicate clearly what they are offering. This not only helps the algorithm but also so that someone scrolling by can instantly understand. Remember, most of the time you only have about 3 seconds to grab people’s attention.
If you are selling a product, however, make sure your text overlay doesn’t cover the picture of the product. Pinterest Lens can ‘read’ images taken by users and show them similar Pins - so use high-quality photographs with an unobscured view of your products so that Pinterest can match people’s visual searches with your Pins.
Pinterest SEO Tips for Your Boards
Boards are another place for you to use keywords to increase your relevance and help the overall score of your profile. Make sure that you are using keywords and are very clear about the purpose of the Boards in their titles and descriptions. Another Pinterest SEO tip is that Pinterest allows you to choose a category for each Board - make sure that the one you are choosing is the one the other Boards in your chosen topic also use.
In terms of Pinterest SEO tips for what kind of Boards you should have, definitely make sure that you have a Board for every topic you blog about. Have a variety of Board names - from the very general and overarching keywords like ‘Vegan fashion’ to a few very specific longtail keywords, like ‘sustainable vegan winter scarves in Austin’. This helps to hone your Pinterest SEO by making it very clear what your account is about. Boards can come up in searches just like Pins can, so some longtail Boards will help you to appear in searches and get more exposure on your account.
Remember to only Pin content that is directly relevant to your Board titles and descriptions - don’t go off-keyword. Pinterest SEO is all about being specific.
And again: Pin other people’s Pins as well as your own. Being associated with a network of Pins and Pinners helps Pinterest to categorize you by association, so make sure you are Pinning the kind of content that you are also creating.
Final Thoughts on Pinterest SEO
As you can see, there are a lot of things you can do to improve your Pinterest SEO, but they always come back to two cornerstones: clarity and relevance. Use keywords strategically and consistently produce Pins that are clear about what they’re about and relevant to Pinterest’s users’ searches, and your Pinterest SEO will inevitably improve.
We really believe that Pinterest can be an incredible tool for businesses to grow - check out our guide to using Pinterest for business!
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