You are wondering how to increase blog traffic with Pinterest SEO? Great to have you here! In this blog post, we will share our detailed Pinterest SEO strategy that helped us to grow our Pinterest account from 0 to 87k monthly unique viewers in 2 months and increase our blog traffic to 122%.
This is Part 2 of our Using Pinterest Marketing For Blogging series. In Part 1 you have learned why Pinterest marketing is powerful compared to Google marketing, and you have prepared your Pinterest account for implementing your Pinterest marketing strategy. In this post, we will dive deep into Pinterest SEO.
If you want to learn what Pinterest SEO is, why it is important, and how to optimize your pins and website content for Pinterest SEO and to get more traffic to your blog or website, then keep on reading.
Also, if you want to step up your blogging game, don’t miss:
- Pinterest Marketing Basics: How to Drive Pinterest Traffic to your Blog
- Download our FREE Blogging Secrets Checklist & learn what rich bloggers don’t tell you.
📌 Save this post to your Blogging board on Pinterest!📌
Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you use them to make a purchase, we will earn a small commission. There are no additional costs to you, but it helps us keep this blog alive. The products and services we recommend are based on our own opinions. Enjoy!
What is Pinterest SEO?
Just as Google SEO, Pinterest SEO is a form of search engine optimization. SEO means optimizing your website with relevant keywords that help a search engine to accurately classify your content and suggest it to users that are looking for this kind of information. The benefit of Pinterest SEO, as compared to Google SEO is that, while it typically takes Google several months to rank your content in the search results, you can get clicks to your website on Pinterest from Day 1.
For your content to become visible on Pinterest, you need to first understand the basic principles of Pinterest SEO. We’ll go over the basics as well as dive deep into specific aspects that will help you increase your reach and, consequently, increase clicks to your website.
Pinterest Analytics. How we used SEO to increase our impressions on Pinterest
1. Creating niche specific and SEO optimized boards
After you have optimized your Pinterest profile for Pinterest SEO to work, the next step of getting your account Pinterest SEO ready is to create strong Pinterest boards. What do we mean by “strong”? You guessed it! They need to be relevant for your niche and they need to be keyword optimized.
Titles
While Pinterest is generally a platform where creativity and visual appeal are important, do not be creative with your keywords! This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s a piece of advice that is crucial for your Pinterest SEO success.
Name your boards plain and simple, using keywords you discovered during your SEO research. So, if you’re talking about amazing travel destinations, don’t name your board “WOW!!!” Call it “Best travel destinations”, “Europe Travel” or “Places to visit in Spain”. You get it!
[screenshot of board descriptions]
Create at least 15 to 30 boards that are relevant to your website or blog content. You can create multiple boards per topic. Just make sure that you use different but related keywords.
Description
Each of your boards needs to explain what it is about in its board description. Also here, the same advice as before holds: us the available 500 characters as much as possible and use as many related keywords as you can.
Make it easy for readers to read through your description by starting off with a question to make them relate to you and and to create curiosity. Then, clearly state what type of content they can expect from you on this board and how you will create value for them.
Being to the point will not only increase your chances that the person will follow you. It will also, and most importantly, explain to Pinterest for which keywords to rank your content properly.
Pins
Before you save any of your own pins to your boards, save at least 20 to 30 popular pins in your niche to your board. This point is important! It’s a tactic that helped us immensely with our Pinterest monthly impressions right from the beginning.
Not all pins that you save need to have over 1,000 re-pins. But it’s good to have a couple of highly popular pins in your curated pins mix. Having a good amount of starring related pins in your boards, helps Pinterest further to understand the nature and quality of your boards and creates the best possible starting conditions for your own pins.
2. Optimizing your pins for Pinterest SEO
We don’t need to tell you that creating high quality pins is one of the most important parts of using Pinterest for your blog and the one key determinant if someone clicks further to your website or not. What is a good conversion, you’re asking? A ratio of 1% between link clicks to impressions is a good aim.
So, how to increase blog traffic with pins? There are three main ingredients to your getting-clicks-from-Pinterest recipe:
- Creating images that stand out
- Optimizing your pins for Pinterest SEO
- Optimizing your website content for Pinterest SEO
Creating images that stand out
As you know, Pinterest is a visual search engine. So it will not come as a surprise to you that Pinterest users naturally prefer beautiful images as compared to boring text and visually unappealing content. Thus, your job is to please their spoilt eyes with your pins! This includes a couple of aspects to consider:
Size
The ideal pins, as recommended by Pinterest, are vertical pins and have an aspect ratio of 2:3 with a minimum of 600 pixels. This means a pin could be 600 pixels x 900 pixels. You will notice many pins on Pinterest with an aspect ratio of 1:2. These pins are fine too. In fact, they could potentially increase your engagement rate as they might stand out more by taking up more space in a user’s feed. Experiment which ratio performs best for your pins.
Design
Remember, your pins should look beautiful and professional. They should capture a pinner’s attention with their fonts, colors, and pin images. You’ll be happy to hear that you don’t need to be a professional designer to create great pins! We recommend Canva for your pin designs. Canva is a free tool that has great templates specifically for Pinterest, called “Pinterest Graphic”. Another benefit of Canva is that it has plenty of free copyright images you can use for your pin designs.
While many say that orange-peachy colors have proven to perform best, we haven’t made that experience. Pinterest themselves are providing guidelines for designing beautiful pins. Check out Pinterest’s Creative best practices.
Text overlay
Now, this is important. To get clicks to your website, text overlay is a must! It should summarize clearly the value of your blog post while leaving room for curiosity to make a user click through to your website. We made the mistake of choosing too small font sizes when we first started with Pinterest SEO. Our recommendation is to create pins on which the text overlay covers at least 50 precent of the entire pin space. Use big font sizes and avoid unreadable fonts and colors.
Use of pictures
It took us a while to figure this out, so we don’t want you to make the same mistake! Pinterest is taking into account various factors to figure out what your pin and blog post are about. The platform is using a sophisticated visual analysis and one of the factors of their algorithm is the images and objects you use in your pin design. So, if you’re talking about “How to increase your blog traffic”or “How to use Pinterest for blogging”, it helps to show a laptop or somebody holding a phone. Be creative with your pin design, but don’t go too abstract!
Create multiple pin designs for one blog post
This is super important! Create multiple pin designs for one blog post to experiment with colors, different text overlay, and images. We typically create four different pin designs for one blog post. Having multiple designs per blog posts increases your chances to be seen on the platform.
Optimizing your pins for Pinterest SEO
To optimize your pins for Pinterest SEO, you need to pay attention to your pin title, the pin description, your use of hashtags, and which boards you save your pin to.
Pin title
Keywords are, as the name says, key! Include relevant keywords into your pin title and write titles that make the reader curious to read on. Use the maximum character count that is available. Make sure that the pin title matches your blog title as much as possible to confirm to Pinterest that the pin is correctly summarizing the content of you destination link.
Pin description
Each time you create a new pin, you need to do thorough keyword research, as described in point 1. Include as many relevant key terms as you can, while making sure that the description is still following a smooth sentence flow.
To build up your post description, start out with a question to capture the attention of the reader. Explain then what you can offer to answer this question. Next, detail out what the reader will concretely find in your blog post. End the description with a call to action. The only thing missing to make your pin description complete is hashtags.
Hashtags
Similar as on Instagram, Pinterest is using hashtags to tag pieces of content. While on Instagram many recommend to use the full amount of 30 hashtags per post, this is not the case for Pinterest. Use 3 to 5 hashtags per pin description. Select keywords you found during your keyword research as hashtags.
3. Optimizing your destination link for Pinterest SEO
Neglecting this point was one of the key mistakes we made when we started out with Pinterest SEO. It took us one long month to realize that instead of optimizing our blog only for Google SEO, we should actively optimize our website content for Pinterest SEO as well.
Understanding this, made us increase our pin impressions by 500% on the first day a pin goes online and increase our click through rate from 0.07% to 4%! [You remember, 1% is the target click through rate according to Pinterest SEO experts!]
So, how do you optimize your blog post for Pinterest SEO? Exactly! Next to including Google keywords into your blog post, you include also Pinterest keywords throughout your blog post. In particular:
- Include your primary Pinterest keyword or key phrase into your blog post title.
- Add your primary Pinterest keywords and other related keywords in the first paragraph of your blog post.
- Repeat Pinterest keywords throughout your blog post.
We use the Yoast plugin for WordPress for our blog SEO optimization. It’s free and it’s a very useful tool to improve the readability and SEO performance of your website.
Saving your pins to boards
Make sure to read this section carefully, as it’s mandatory for your Pinterest SEO success!
1. Save the first pin you publish to your most relevant board first. What is the most relevant board? The one whose board title and board description match best with your pin title and pin description. Ideally, the board title keyword should be picked up in the pin title as well. Pin the first pin to your most relevant board manually on Pinterest!
2. Save your pin to other relevant boards. After you published your first pin to the most relevant board, pin the same pin to 5 to 10 other relevant boards. Warning! Leave at least one day between pinning the same pin to different boards. Don’t pin these pins manually. Re-pinning your pins to multiple boards will cost you too much time and become very messy as soon as you publish multiple pins a day. Re-pin pins to the rest of your boards using with the Tailwind Scheduler.
4. Tailwind!
After the Pinterest SEO Secrets of Anastasia Blogger, Tailwind was seriously our most important discovery for how to increase blog traffic! We found Tailwind through a recommendation of our blogger friends and we’re so glad we did! I’m telling you honestly, getting to serious results on Pinterest is NOT possible without Tailwind. Even as beginners on Pinterest.
We started with their Scheduler with a 1 month free trial. We saw results from week 2 and decided to buy a subscription. It has helped us to grow our Pinterest account and blog traffic in ways that we couldn’t have done through manual pinning.
Consistency is king
The one thing that really helped us increase our blog traffic by 154% through Pinterest traffic was sharing more pins every day.
We are currently sharing on average 25 pins daily. Of these, 70% are our own pins and 30% are curated pins of others that we are re-pinning on our boards.
To increase your monthly viewers on Pinterest and increase traffic to your blog from Pinterest, you need to share 10 to 30 pins every single day. And Tailwind is the way to do it! Before we started with Tailwind, we had 93 pins. Now we have 2500 pins across our boards! This means we have shared over 2400 pins in less than 2 months.
Pinning this amount of pins every day is simply not possible manually for us. Tailwind takes over this time consuming part of our job, so we can spend our time more effectively on other tasks. We now typically schedule 2 weeks of Pinterest pinyin 1 day with Tailwind. So instead of spending hours every day on Pinterest on manual pinning, we schedule an entire month on only 2 days.
Tailwind Tribes
One of our favorite drivers for how to increase blog traffic with Pinterest is to use Tailwind Tribes! Tailwind Tribes are the “new” Pinterest groups. You can find Tailwind Tribes within your niche and join them to share and re-share pins in that niche.
There are two main benefits of Tailwind Tribes. Firstly, they make it easier to find high quality pins to re-share to your boards because all Tribe members are verified content creators. And secondly, and most importantly (!), you get the chance for your content to get re-shared by huge Pinterest accounts, which can explode your impressions and clicks!
Getting one of our pins re-shared by a big account, seriously stepped up our Pinterest game! Our number 1 pin until today is a pin that was re-pinned by another Pinterest account thanks to Tailwind Tribes.
Get your 1 Month Free Tailwind Trial
Use our Tailwind link to get a 1 month Free Trial! Try out the platform and see the results for yourself. After the trial, you will get a $15 discount if you use our Tailwind link. It will cost you $9.99 a month, which is a very reasonable price for the results that you will see.
PS: With the trial package, you can schedule 100 pins with the Tailwind scheduler and you can join 5 Tailwind tribes, which is more than enough to start out!
Excel on Pinterest with Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets
If you want to learn more about Pinterest SEO, we highly recommend you to subscribe to Anastasia Blogger’s free Youtube channel. Anastasia is a Pinterest marketing expert with over 10 million monthly unique viewers on Pinterest and over 300,000 page views to her blog from Pinterest. The knowledge of this girl is amazing and everything we know we learnt from her.
If you like Anastasia’s teaching style and want to dive deeper into Pinterest SEO, consider purchasing Anastasia’s Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. Really, compared to other Pinterest courses, you will get an in-depth curriculum with 1:1 coaching and access to a community at a good price.
[screenshot Traffic secrets]
Now it’s your turn!
Wow, this Using Pinterest Marketing For Blogging series is the longest blog post we’ve ever written, but we hope that it’s full of useful information for how to increase blog traffic. Using Pinterest marketing for our blog and learning about Pinterest SEO helped us to substantially grow our blog traffic in only 2 months, after struggling with Google SEO for over half a year. We hope that this detailed guide with Pinterest SEO tips will help you to kick start your Pinterest success and increase your blog traffic significantly.
Let us know if we helped you learn something new and if there is anything else that you want to know! Until then, happy pinning!
I have an ecommerce website and I don’t understand why/how I would go about pinning pins from other sites. I can’t use competitors and I want to avoid DIY since I’m selling a product. How do I do that?
Hey Jason! May I ask you what type of product you’re selling? You could think about offering content around the use of your product. You could also target readers that don’t know yet that they need your product and make them aware of your profile. Think about the user, their interests & needs, and their buying journey. For example, let’s assume you are selling cameras. In that case, I would share content around photography (best settings, tutorials, reviews of your camera, things like that). You could also talk about best photo spots in xyz, best poses, etc. You could also test your pinning strategy by pinning from others for about 1 month and analyze whether your views and website traffic increased, and adapt accordingly. Let me know if you have more questions!