SEO for Pinterest: 5 useful tips to begin with

Do you want to dominate Pinterest and give new life to your multimedia content? Discover our practical SEO tips to conquer the world of pins. Yeah!

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more. Source: help.pinterest.com

But let's not be influenced by personal opinions and try to get to the point by looking at some data. Pinterest, within its business platform, provides us with many interesting numbers about its users.

• 445 million weekly users. These are not visits, but users who return to the platform at least once a week;
• 60% of the global audience is made up of female users;
• The presence of male users aged between 21 and 24 (Generation Z) has grown by 40% compared to 2021;
• 97% of the most popular searches on Pinterest do not contain references to brands;
• 80% of Pinterest's weekly users have discovered a new brand or product on the platform;
• Pinterest users spend 40% more than on social platforms;
• The average cart value of a Pinterest user is 85% higher than those coming from other platforms.

1. Pinterest users are very diverse in terms of age groups;
2. They are evenly split between men and women, with a slight predominance of female users;
3. They make purchases more frequently than users of other social media platforms;
4. They spend more compared to users from other platforms.

Implementing an SEO strategy on Pinterest in 2023 is strategically beneficial for (almost) all types of brands. Firstly, it allows you to bring quality traffic to your website and, above all, it is one of the fundamental steps to transform the perception of your brand from "recognizable" to "Top of Mind"!

Developing brand awareness is in fact the flagship of Pinterest. Above, we have seen that 97% of searches do not contain references to specific companies or products, but are mainly focused on the search for inspiration and ideas. "Inspiration" is the keyword that interests us the most because it occupies an entire quadrant of the Content Marketing matrix.

1) Domain Quality

Refers to the quality of the domain that your pins lead to. Keep in mind that you'll need to insert a pixel on your website, so the analysis of user behavior is deep.

2) Pin Quality

The quality of the pin is based on levels of engagement and the popularity of the pin.

3) Pinner Quality

Refers to the quality of the account and is based on the frequency of publication, the frequency of interaction with the platform, and the quality of the pins published.

4) Relevance of the topics covered

Determines whether Pinterest wants to show your content to its users or not. In this case, you can use Pinterest Analytics' Audience Insights to develop a high-performing editorial plan based on data.

Simply translated: the Pinterest algorithm rewards profiles that are consistent with what they report on their website, frequently post high-quality pins, and cover topics that are thought-provoking to their audience.

1) CREATE A BUSINESS ACCOUNT

You must first switch to a business profile if you are using Pinterest for business purposes. Using a private account for business purposes is contrary to Pinterest's terms of service. 

With a business account, which is completely free, you can access your account statistics and thus essential information about user activity. With a Business account you can also use Rich Pins and other features of Pinterest.

In addition, it offers benefits such as:

•  the possibility to include a link to your website in your profile bio to increase traffic;
• the use of data analysis tools to evaluate the effectiveness of the published editorial plan;
• the opportunity to build brand authority;
• the use of advertising features to complete a 360-degree user marketing strategy.

2) VERIFY YOUR WEBSITE

This step consists in verifying your website on Pinterest by authenticating your domain. This formally tells Pinterest that the company you represent is the actual company. Exactly as you do with Google Analytics or Meta's Business Manager, there are various methods of verification:

• Inserting an HTML tag in the <head> of the website;
• Uploading an HTML file to the mail (root) directory of the website;
• Inserting a verification record TXT in your website domain.

3) OBVIOUSLY, CREATE QUALITY CONTENTS

Being a visual search engine, image quality is FUNDAMENTAL. Quality content must be at the forefront of any SEO strategy on Pinterest, on your website or any other platform. There is no way around it.

 Search engine algorithms have become, needless to say, very good at figuring out what users like and don't like. Exactly the same way that it is no longer enough to fill a website with a ton of useless and poorly written material, to insert keywords here and there hoping to rank, it is also crucial on Pinterest to create quality pins that can generate engagement and retention for the platform's users.

In other words, if content is self-referential or of poor quality, users will not share it, comment on it or save it. Nor will they be motivated to follow you, and - we saw this a moment ago - those kinds of interactions are the basis of Pinterest's ranking algorithm.

4) DEVELOP AN EDITORIAL PLAN BASED ON USER RESEARCH

Forcing your hand by proposing what WE think is interesting is a strategy I would call "kamikaze." You have to accept that users have no intention of wasting time online reading pages full of standard text and looking at stock photos. To do SEO, you have to identify with your typical users. When, after doing a Google search, you land on a blog article, do you read word-for-word the default introductory texts or do you go straight to the point trying to find the answer to your question?

Exactly.

Pinterest's search bar in this case comes to our rescue. Just like on Google, there is a suggestion (or autocomplete) feature that shows us searches related to the word we enter.

These are the topics that users are most searching for in the kitchen industry right now. If we have adequate material, we can create a topic board and publish it! If, on the other hand, we don't have adequate material, then it's time to start producing something creative that can give users what they are looking for and try to position yourself as an answer to a possible problem they may have.

5) CEATE THEMATIC BOARDS BASED ON YOUR KEYWORDS OF INTEREST

Pinterest profile boards are our business card and secret weapon. Have you ever tried to Google some "ideas" or "inspiration"? Try it now. You'll notice that the first search results are from Pinterest, but they are almost never pins or profiles; they are, in fact, boards.

In this article I wanted to present how a part of the Pinterest algorithm works and the actions you can take to start developing a successful SEO strategy. It is essential to start familiarizing yourself with the platform by starting with the basics and, precisely for this reason, I suggest you start your training on the Pinterest academy that will give you a general overview of the platform and advertising features.

If you have any interesting project to propose to us or you simply want to learn more about Pinterest and its SEO features, contact us and let's talk about it here at our web agency over coffee!

Happy Pinning