Pinterest SEO: The Definitive Guide
Pinterest SEO guide: How to get better results on your Pinterest marketing efforts
Depending on your target audience, having Pinterest part of your marketing strategy can bring a lot of benefits to your business. More exposure, sales and traffic.
In order to enjoy these benefits you need to do Pinterest SEO, otherwise simply pinning content is a luck game, you may or may not get any results. In most cases you won’t.
So why is Pinterest SEO important? Because if you want your pins to be seen by the people who are searching for them, you need to make sure you're doing everything you can to optimize your pins for the Pinterest search engine.
In this guide, we share with you the knowledge needed for you to start on the right foot with Pinterest. In case you are already using Pinterest and seeing weak results, then this guide will help you improve them in your future efforts.
Pinterest SEO is Search Engine Optimization for Pinterest. It is optimizing your account, pins and boards in a way that Pinterest’s algorithm can clearly understand and determine what users will see in their smart feed.
Your objective is for your pins to appear in the first few top results when someone searches on Pinterest using certain keywords.
You can easily optimize for the Pinterest search engine by following Pinterest’s own best practices and guidelines on things like: pin dimensions, text usage and others. We also use their native tools as well as third party tools to do keyword research, see analytics and more.
We will dive deeper into Pinterest SEO later in the guide, but first let’s try to understand some Pinterest basics so you have a solid ground to build on.
What is Pinterest?
According to Pinterest:
Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more.
In short, Pinterest is a search engine. Much like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and others. It’s a visual search engine, so it indexes and serves visual content like images and videos.
Just like webmasters optimize their websites for search engines to appear on the top results of Google, you can do the same with Pinterest.
We can also say that Pinterest is a social media platform. People use Pinterest to post content, follow others and engage with their pins. Pinterest users are growing all around the world, too!
As of April 2022, Pinterest has more than 433 million monthly active users. To put this into perspective, that’s 8.4% of people aged 15-64 in the world!
When it comes to growth, Pinterest has the second largest year-on-year growth in terms of audience size among other social networks (an increase of 12.4% to be exact). That’s a big deal.
As of January 2022, Pinterest’s biggest audience based on gender are females between the ages of 25 and 34 years old, accounting for 29.1% of the social media network's global audience. If your target audience includes this demographic group, there’s a big chance that your ideal customers use Pinterest.
So, how does Pinterest work?
When you sign up for a Pinterest account, you can choose to either create a personal account or a business account.
If you're using Pinterest for your business, we recommend setting up a business account so that you can take advantage of all the features that Pinterest offers to businesses.
Using a Pinterest Business account will let you enjoy features like:
Access to your pins analytics
Ability to run Pinterest ads
Including links in your pins
If you have a personal Pinterest account and want to convert it to a business account, follow these simple instructions from Pinterest.
Once you've completed the process, you'll have access to all the same features as someone who signs up for a Pinterest business account from scratch. So no worries if you decided to create a Pinterest business account at a later time.
Moreover, if you prefer to keep your personal and business account separate, you can also create a linked Pinterest business account to a personal account.
Pinterest Elements: What makes Pinterest Pinterest?
Pinning
Posting on Pinterest is called “Pinning”: I pin, you pin, we all pin. Pinning is the simple act of sharing visual content on Pinterest.
Board
“Board” or “Pinboard”: It’s a collection of theme-based pins. Think of Pinterest boards as buckets in which you put certain pins related to the same topic or subtopic. (Later on, you’ll learn how to create and optimize them).
Types of Pinterest boards:
A standard board is just the default board you can create at any time.
Secret boards are the same standard boards, the only difference is keeping it from being public. One smart thing you could do with secret boards is previewing or testing images before publishing.
You can also use Pinterest secret boards for collaboration, to test what a pin will look like on mobile, or if you want to have a board with a minimum number of pins before making it public.
Secret boards have a lock on the top left corner.
Pinterest group boards are a great way to collaborate with others. You can invite friends, add notes and favorite your pins so each will have their own list within the board.
Pin
A post on Pinterest is called a “Pin”. Pins are bookmarks that people use to save content they love on Pinterest: images, videos, or products. We’ll talk about how to optimize them.
Types of pins:
There are 7 types of pins.
- Image Pins
Image pins are the standard Pinterest pins. You can create them from photos or from graphics you made with text overlay.Have a look at a Pin's anatomy.
Video Pins
They say that an image says a thousand words. Well, 1 second of video contains 25 images! Video pins help you tell your story in a different way.
Carousel Pins
Carousel pins are great if you want to show variations of a product, features of a product or a variety of products. Think: sizes, colors or simply categories.
Idea Pins
Idea pins let you combine multiple formats. So you can use video, images, and text in a single pin. They are ideal for step-by-step guides and that extra personalization.
Collection Pins
Collection pins are for businesses with an e-commerce website. You can tag products from your catalog to include them in the pin. Collection pins only show on mobile devices.
Try on Product Pins
Try on product pins use AI technology and Pinterest Lens to let you try on virtually any product you find on Pinterest.
Rich Pins
Lastly, rich pins are organic pins with synced metadata from your website. When you manually add the metadata on your website’s article or recipe, Pinterest will automatically connect the information from your website and show it above and below the image when you click on the pin. To give you a better idea:
Recipe rich Pins add a title, serving size, cook time, ratings, diet preference, and a list of ingredients to recipes that you Pin from your site.
Article rich Pins add the headline or title, the description, and the author of the article or blog post from your site.
Product rich Pins include the most up-to-date pricing, availability, and product information right on your Pin.
Pinner:
A pinner is any Pinterest user. Like you or me!
Pin button:
That “save” or “pin” button that you see when hovering over images on some websites. We’ll show you how to install it on your website if you haven’t done so already.
Repin:
The act of sharing an existing pin that was added to Pinterest by another user.
Feed:
The Pinterest home feed is what you see when you open the app. What you see on the feed is influenced by your activities on the platform. It is influenced by the content you pin, like, comment or from the search queries you use to find the content you’re looking for.
Lens:
Pinterest Lens allows you to take a photo of something from the mobile Pinterest app and it will bring results related to the object in your photo. Similar to Google image search.
Lens:
Pinterest Lens allows you to take a photo of something from the mobile Pinterest app and it will bring results related to the object in your photo. Similar to Google image search.
If you want to be successful and gain traction on Pinterest, you need to have some understanding of how the Pinterest algorithm works.
Pinterest has an algorithm that ranks pins and boards to determine what content is most relevant to a specific user to be shown in their feed. This algorithm takes into account a variety of factors.
Pinterest algorithm factors:
Truth is, no one really knows how Pinterest's algorithm works. We know that Pinterest uses systems like Pixie and Pinnability to determine the best Pin to show to a user. From our research, we could gather that these are the 4 main factors that Pinterest’s algorithm takes into account:
The quality of the claimed domain
When speaking of SEO for Google or Yahoo, domain quality or domain authority is usually affected by the age of the domain and the number and quality of links pointing to it.
In this case, it’s a little different. We can say that the “quality of the domain” here is pretty much affected by the factors below over time. On top of that, there are a few things to do and keep in mind:
As we mentioned, it’s important that you switch to or create a Pinterest business account.
Claim your website. We can’t be sure, but on the same day, we claimed our website on our 1000 follower Pinterest account, and our impressions and clicks improved.
Pin consistently: Consistency is considered to be one of the most powerful forces in life. The same applies to Pinterest. Instead of pinning a large number of pins sporadically, divide them into smaller equal parts and pin them regularly and to their relevant boards.
Activate Rich Pins. Rich pins are pins that pull data from products, articles or recipes from the metadata you use on your website. Learn more about Rich Pins on Pinterest.
Pin high-quality, engaging, and fresh content to relevant boards. Pinterest can recognize duplicate and similar images.
Pin quality
Good quality pins are made from a combination of using high-quality images, compelling copy and making people want to learn more about your story.
Here are the important things to keep in mind when you are planning your pins:
Use high-quality images
Include your logo
Write a compelling copy
Include a CTA (call to action)
Include a destination link
Use simple text overlays with high contrast against media
You can find more tips and details in Pinterest’s pinning best practices.
3. Pinner quality
Pinner quality is the score Pinterest gives to you as a pinner, a Pinterest content creator. Pinterest looks at how people engage with your pins, boards and overall profile.
Pinterest looks at your pins’ engagement rate, the overall quality of your pins, and the quality of the pins you repin from other users.
The more clicks saves and other engagement with your content the more likely Pinterest will rank your content first.
4. Topic relevance
When it comes to topic relevance, if you’re somewhat familiar with SEO in general, topic relevance is one of the most important factors for algorithms.
Things like Likes, repins, freshness, location, gender are also factors taken into account by the Pinterest algorithm.
Pins are often accompanied by text. Pinterest use “Annotations” to understand text. (We highly recommend checking out this article).
What exactly are annotations?
Heath Vinicombe, Software Engineer at Pinterest wrote:
“Annotations are short keywords or phrases between one and six words that describe the subject of the Pin.
In addition to its text content, each annotation also has a confidence score and a language associated with it. We extract multiple annotations per Pin across a total of 28 languages.”
The image below shows how Pinterest extracts annotations from the text in the pin, with a score.
This should give you a clear understanding of how Pinterest sees and understands text, so you can optimize your pins accordingly.
Remember that your pins are intended for humans in the first place, so it’s good practice to avoid stuffing keywords. It’s an outdated trick that makes your account and content look unprofessional and spammy.
Stay relevant to the board you’re pinning to and to your business topics. We will go in more details on how to optimize them.
When it comes to text, here are the things the algorithm looks at when scanning for keywords:
The board description, title and board image overlay text
- The pin title, description and board image overlay text.
It also looks in the destination URL and scans for keywords and images in the target page.
Domain quality, remember? That’s also one of the signals!
New pins you release are served to your followers first. It then gauges the engagement to decide how to serve it to the public beyond your followers.
Hashtags? Sure, but we'd rather use this text in the description. Many reports say that they are very little beneficial. We didn’t think it’s important enough to provide more info on hashtags but it’s worth the mention.
Note: Before we start optimizing make sure you create or switch to a business account and claim your website if you haven’t done it yet.
Add the Save button
Add the Pinterest save button to your website so visitors can pin images directly from your blog or your online store.
People who engage with your website tell Pinterest that you have great content and will contribute to increasing that Domain Quality we spoke about earlier.
Do keyword research
Doing some keyword research and competitive analysis should be one of your first steps before you start writing any text. As we saw before, text is one of the main signals for Pinterest to understand relevance.
Keyword research is when you look for the keywords people are using to find certain information.
Just like optimizing for Google SEO and other search engines, you need to use keywords that are right for your business if you want your content to be found by your target audience.
There are a few different places where you can include relevant keywords on Pinterest: in your profile About section, Username, in board titles and descriptions, and in pin titles and descriptions. We'll go over each of these in more detail below.
There are a few ways and tools to do keyword research:
Pinterest keyword research tools
Pinterest guided search or auto-complete
Type in your search idea in the Pinterest search bar on a desktop computer
Click and drag to select all the results. Keep dragging down to select the ones we don’t see.
Copy the list and paste it into a text editor.
Now you have an entirely new list of keyword ideas in order of engagement and popularity according to Pinterest.
Pinterest Ads
You don’t need to run ads to be able to use the Pinterest keyword research tool.
Start creating an ad and on the second page you’ll have the keyword tool that shows the keyword with the search volume.
You don’t have to publish the ad. You can always come back to the same ad you started and use the keyword tool.
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Again, we’re not going to run any ads. But to use Google's keyword tool, Keyword Planner,you need to have a Google Ads account. It’s free and you get access to the tool. If you have a website or any other reason to run ads on Google Ads, we suggest you do. Why?
Because if you don’t have any ads running, the search volume Google Ads shows you is a range. So a keyword will have 10-100 or 1K-10K searches per month. If you run an ad, you’ll get more precise numbers. Like 20, 320, and so on.
Is it going to cost you money to use the Keyword Planner?
Yes, but it can be as little as 2 dollars, then you can stop the ad. They will keep showing the precise numbers even after you stop the ad, for months (from our experience at least!)
When it comes to looking for Pinterest keywords I would include in my search the word “pinterest”. This will give you an idea of what people are searching for on Google but want to see on Pinterest.
Remember, those keywords are from Google Search data, not Pinterest search.
Also, if you’re not targeting a country and are using English, then consider removing the location, this way you get the search volume for all the countries Google serves.
Pinterest Trends
Pinterest Trends is a tool by Pinterest that allows you to see trends of searches. You can access it without an account and it’s only available in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Similar to Google Trends, it doesn’t give you the search volume but the way it’s trending over time. This can help you decide which topics to cover.
You can access Pinterest Trends from the Analytics drop-down menu.
Pinterest Predicts
Pinterest Predicts analyzes global search data from the previous 2 years. For the 2022 Pinterest Predicts report, the analytics period was from October 2010-September 2021.
If you’re in the technology or marketing business, you’re out of luck. However, don’t fret! Because if you’re in the business of fashion, particularly selling Fuschia dress or checkered outfits, then this is your year. Plenty of ideas for DIY home décor too! Take a look at the PDF report, but come back.
Pinterest boasts that their Pinterest Predicts got 8 out 10 predictions right from 2021. You can check the link for more details on how they tend to predict things.
We covered some tools to help with your keyword research and topic discovery. Remember, during your research, you gotta be checking how your competitors do it, whatever it is you're trying to find, and do it better.
If you want to look for keywords to use in your profile description, check your competitor’s profiles. See which competitors come up in the top results for your target keywords and look at their profiles. Don’t copy all of them! Get inspired and add in your style. And stay relevant.
Moreover, what’s the point of getting lots of traffic if they’re not interested in what you are offering? So, as a rule of thumb, focus on driving traffic that's more likely to convert down through the funnel. Don’t forget that useful and high-quality content is key here.
Now that you have the right keywords to target and other tips to help you understand the scope of your market on Pinterest, let’s move on to put them to use!
Pinterest SEO best practices
This is the fun part when doing SEO for Pinterest. Let’s take a look at the best practices each of your Pinterest elements should be following to get the best results.
Pinterest profile
The first thing you will do is optimize your Pinterest profile. In order to do so, make sure that your content adheres to the specifications below.
Logo: Upload a high-quality logo
- About (your description): it should be 140 characters max. Although Pinterest doesn’t officially say that, it will truncate it if it goes over 140.
Use keywords that you want to be known for: e.g cbd products
- Display name: 65 characters max.
Use keywords e.g: ACBDEF (your brand name) | Organic CBD Products
Note: Pay attention to the Username section and edit the default username for your brand.
Boards
It’s important that your boards are super SEO-friendly. For an e-commerce store or a blog, boards are considered categories. Optimizing your boards makes it easier for Pinterest to understand your pins better and what you are all about. It also makes it easier for your target audience to find you and enjoy your content!
Pinterest boards best practices
Board name: include a main keyword, 50 char max.
Board description: include multiple keywords, 500 char max.
Pin only pins that are relevant to the board.
- Board cover: 600×600 with an aspect ratio of 1×1. Add overlay text with a simple font and strong contrast.
Pins
Make sure to follow these Pinterest best practices.
Pin title: include a main keyword, 100 char max.
Pin description: include multiple keywords, 500 char max.
Destination URL: double check that your URL is live, not broken, and that it loads quickly on every device. The content on the URL should also be relevant to the pin.
Alt-text: include keyword that help describe the image
Include CTA: encourage engagement and think about what next actions you want your visitors to take.
Image pin technical specifications
Orientation: vertical
Aspect ratio: 2:3, 1000x1500 px (pixels) and no less than 600x900 px
Include your logo on the pin
Video pin technical specifications
Video pin aspect ratio: < 1:2 (w:h), > 1.91:1.
Recommended: Square (1:1) or vertical (2:3 or 9:16).
You can consult all the Pinterest Pins best practices and technical specifications and make sure your pins are in the best shape. They cover all the Rich Pins formats, Ideas Pins, Video Pins, and more.
More Pinterest SEO tips
We look at other activities that will help you reach and engage with the right audience. Keyword-rich and high quality content are essential, but some you can back that up with some other tactics:
Join group boards
You’re now familiar with Group Boards. In case you forgot, they are boards created by other users who allow pinners like you to pin their own content. Only the creator of the board can edit the settings.
Group boards help broaden creators’ and collaborators’ reach.
They are easy to identify in your Saved section, you can see multiple users on the cover.
Follow other relevant boards
Follow and genuinely engage with other users and other boards and pins. This will help you widen your network and reach more audiences. Allocate some time for this every time you’re working on your Pinterest account.
Pinterest analytics
Pinterest analytics is a free built-in tool on the Pinterest app. It is vital for improving your Pinterest marketing efforts. Look at the analytics metrics to decide which posts work best for your business.
Tailwind for Scheduling
We spoke before about how pinning consistently is important for your overall Pinterest account value. The recommended number of pins among the Pinterest communities is 10-20 per day.
Tailwind seems to be one of the best solutions to create and schedule pins.
Fortunately, Tailwind offers a free version and a free trial on the paid version. This way you can try it and learn how to use it for free. If you feel the need to upgrade, their Pro pack starts at $9.99 (1 cocktail drink in Southern Europe!).
It’s your turn
Congrats! Now you have a pretty advanced understanding of Pinterest for business, Pinterest SEO and how it all works. On the outside as well as under the hood.
Now it’s time for you to start implementing what you learned. You can always come back to this guide to double check things, so don’t forget to bookmark it.
Remember, be consistent with your efforts and give it enough time to be able to test things and measure them. Doing so will help you make an informed decision and see if Pinterest is the right platform to focus on depending on your business.
If you have any suggestions or comments, please let us know. Our aim is to learn together and share it with you!
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