There is no doubt that Pinterest is one of the top social media platforms for bloggers. If you want to be a successful blogger or online entrepreneur and know how to increase blog traffic, then you need to take your Pinterest marketing strategy seriously.
When we first started our blog, we didn’t even consider using Pinterest for blog as a potential traffic driver. I have had a Pinterest user account for over ten years, but I used to mainly open the app for finding interior design inspiration or new hairstyle ideas.
It wasn’t until I came across the Youtube video Pinterest for Bloggers: Get Traffic to your website FAST of Pinterest SEO marketing expert Anastasia Blogger, while doing research about how to increase blog traffic, that I heard about Pinterest traffic and Pinterest marketing for bloggers.
This is when it clicked for us!
Pinterest is not another social media channel. It is a search engine, just like Google, and a traffic generation MACHINE! From that moment on we knew that we had to learn everything about how to use Pinterest for blogging.
You can imagine, learning this felt like a blessing and a curse at the same time.
A blessing, because we seemed to have found a new way of how to increase blog traffic. And a curse, because we had no clue about Pinterest traffic and no idea where to even begin with creating a Pinterest marketing strategy.
We learned as much as we could about how to use Pinterest for blogging in the shortest time possible. We grew our Pinterest monthly viewers from 0 to 87K monthly unique viewers in 2 months through Pinterest SEO. It was an absolute game changer for us for how to increase our blog traffic.
Pinterest Analytics. Link Clicks to our blog from Oct to Dec 2019
Growing our presence on Pinterest helped us increase our blog traffic to 122% in monthly unique visitors.
Google Analytics. Traffic breakdown per day for 7 days in December 2019.
If you want to know which Pinterest marketing strategy helped us to grow our Pinterest account from 0 to 87k monthly unique viewers in less than 2 months and increase our blog traffic to 122%, then keep on reading.
We structured this blog post into two parts. This post is Part 1 and it will teach you the steps you need to take first before you can start driving Pinterest traffic to your website with Pinterest marketing. In Part 2 we will then cover all our learnings about Pinterest SEO. Pinterest SEO helped us to grow our Pinterest account to 87k unique monthly viewers in only 2 months and to increase our blog traffic to 122%.
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How we went from 0 to 87k monthly unique viewers with Pinterest marketing
We said it before, Pinterest is one of the best traffic drivers for blogs, e-commerce websites, and online coaches and courses. Just as Google, Pinterest is search engine. This means, Pinterest users come to the platform not only to get inspiration but, more importantly, to solve a problem. You as Pinterest content creator offer a solution that will help those users in your niche and you make them discover your offering (e.g. your blog post) through Pinterest marketing.
Optimizing your website with Pinterest SEO will help Pinterest to accurately classify your content and suggest it to users that are looking for this kind of information. The benefit of Pinterest marketing and Pinterest as a search engine, as compared to Google is that, while it typically takes Google several months to rank your content in the search results, you can generate Pinterest traffic from Day 1.
For your content to become visible on Pinterest, you need to first understand the basic principles of Pinterest marketing. 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.
1. Prepare your account for Pinterest marketing
Before you do keywords research and optimize your Pinterest profile and content for Pinterest SEO, you first need to get your account ready. This means you need to take three basic steps first. Luckily, they are easy to do and will take you not more than 15 minutes.
Create a Pinterest business profile
Whether you set up a new Pinterest profile or you already have a personal Pinterest account, for Pinterest SEO to work you will need a Pinterest business profile. Good news, it’s 100% free! It helps Pinterest to understand that you are a content creator and you will even get a helpful welcome-boost from the platform. Something you don’t want to miss out on.
If you create a brand new Pinterest account, select the option of creating a business account. If you want to switch over from a personal account, you can upgrade to a Pinterest business account in your Settings.
You might wonder, what is the better option? It depends, but eventually both options are fine. We converted my personal Pinterest account into our Generation Nomads business account. As mentioned earlier, my personal Pinterest account was full of unrelated pins and boards at that time. If that’s the case for you as well, we recommend you archive all boards that are unrelated to the content of your website. The benefit of archiving boards over deleting them is that when you archive them, you won’t lose followers and monthly impressions to those boards, which helps your statistics.
Verify your domain for Pinterest marketing
Before Pinterest sends users over to your website, you need to verify that your domain is legit and trustworthy. Verifying your website will also allow you to get attribution and analytics for your content on Pinterest. It’s a very quick and straightforward process that shouldn’t take longer than 5 minutes.
Go to your Pinterest settings and click on “Claim” in the menu bar on your left. Follow the instructions.
After you claimed your website, you will be able to see your domain name with a little check-mark on your Pinterest profile.
Enable Rich Pins
Rich pins are pins with additional information attached to them. The additional information comes from metadata of your website. Each time you create a pin and link it to a page on your website, Pinterest pulls metadata from the link you provide and adds it both visibly and invisibly to your pin. For example, one visible result of having rich pins enabled is that your pin title shows up bold.
Okay.. we know, it’s a bit abstract but before you freak out, let me say this: Don’t overthink it, just do it! You don’t need to understand all the background details behind rich pins. You just need to make sure you get approved for Rich Pins.
So how do you get approved for Rich Pins? Surprisingly easy! Just follow the official Pinterest instructions to enable rich pins in two steps. (1) You will need to have metadata set up on your website. (2) Secondly, you have to apply for Rich Pins with a URL of your website in the Pinterest Rich Pin Validator. If you have trouble following the Pinterest instructions, we recommend you watch this Youtube video. Once you’ve submitted your link in the validator, your website should be approved for Rich Pins within an hour.
2. Finding the right keywords for Pinterest marketing
Before you start optimizing your Pinterest account and pins for Pinterest marketing, you need to understand how to find the most powerful keywords for your niche. There are two ways we recommend for discovering the best keywords for you.
Make sure to do your keywords research thoroughly as your Pinterest marketing success will depend on the quality of your keywords and how you use them. This is one of the first and most important steps to succeed driving Pinterest traffic and one of our key learnings of using Pinterest for blogging.
Pinterest search bar
The first keyword search you want to do is using the Pinterest search bar on top of your Pinterest dashboard. Type in a keyword that you plan to target, and look at the related key terms that Pinterest suggests. The more left a key term is listed, the more popular it is in Pinterest search. These are keywords you want to target. Note them down.
One important tip! As opposed to Google keywords, where you want to go as much niche as possible with long-tail keywords, it is better to use more generic keywords on Pinterest. You see the benefit? On Pinterest, your content has equally good chances to be discovered as pins of bloggers with millions of monthly viewers – if you do Pinterest marketing and Pinterest SEO right.
Find inspiration in related pin descriptions
When you enter keywords into your Pinterest search bar, you will not only see related keywords suggestions. You will also find the most popular pins on Pinterest for your topic. These pins managed to rank highest for your keywords and thus, they are a great source of inspiration for the pins and pin descriptions you are about to create.
Click on a popular pin and check its number of re-pins. We typically analyze those pins that get over 1,000 re-pins. Read the pin text overlay, the pin title, and the pin description. Again, note down keywords that these pins use.
Note: The number of re-pins is sometimes hidden in your desktop view. If that is the case for you, open the pin on your mobile. You should be able to see the number of re-pins now.
Find high search volume keywords in the Pinterest Ads tool
This option is a little nerdy, but the effort is well worth it! In our opinion, the Pinterest Ads tool is the most accurate method for predicting how likely it is for certain keywords to be successful for Pinterest SEO.
What you need to do is go to Pinterest Ads. Don’t worry, you don’t need to actually create the ad and spend money! You only use their keyword search volume tool.
Type in the keyword you plan to target. The tool will display all related keywords, plus the number of monthly searches of all keywords! WOW! This is a method we learnt about only a couple of weeks ago, and it seriously has been a game changer since then! The Pinterest ads tool takes out all the guesswork and enables you to create a data driven Pinterest SEO strategy.
3. Optimizing your profile for Pinterest marketing
Now that you know how to do keyword research for you Pinterest marketing strategy, you can apply your learnings for optimizing your Pinterest profile. Why is this important? Because when Pinterest users search for key terms in their search bar, they find not only related pins but also profiles. You want your Pinterest profile to show up in those searches. This is why you need to fill your Pinterest profile with keywords.
Name
Besides your picture, your name is the first piece of information a user receives about you. The first impression counts! Hence, you need to make sure that your name is clearly explaining what your profile is about.
You will notice that most often, people mention their name or website domain first. After that, they add keywords that they want to be found for by separating them with a vertical line. You have a total of 65 characters for your Pinterest name. Make sure to use all available characters!
Profile description
Your profile description is an extension of your Pinterest name. Here you have the chance to explain in more detail what information and topics users will be able to find in your boards and pins.
When writing your description, focus on clearly communicating the value of your content for the user, instead of wasting the space by sharing irrelevant details about yourself. Nobody needs to know that you’re a coffee lover! But if coffee is what you’re talking about in your website, tell how your knowledge of coffee will improve the coffee experience of your readers. Does that make sense?
Again, make sure to use the maximum amount of 160 characters and fill your descriptions with as many relevant keywords as possible. While you do so, pay attention that your description flows nicely and use correct grammar. Keyword stuffing without real sentence structure looks spammy and could be penalized by Pinterest. You don’t wanna get yourself into trouble!
Include a call to action
Using Pinterest for driving traffic to your website, your main goal should be to convert Pinterest users into website visitors. So, how to increase blog traffic with your Pinterest profile? Right! Include a concrete call to action into your profile description. You can promote a freebie, a paid course, or simply a page on your website. Have the conversation you want to achieve in mind, and add a URL into your profile description.
Next steps: How to increase blog traffic with Pinterest SEO
Now that you have set up a verified business Pinterest account with rich pins, have optimized your profile, and know how to do keyword research, we can move on to Part 2 of this Pinterest blog series. In the second part you will learn how to increase blog traffic with Pinterest SEO. You will learn how to apply your learnings of Part 1 to create Pinterest SEO friendly board, how to create click-worthy pins, optimize your linked website landing page, and how to make pinning more efficiently with Tailwind.
My question is understanding why I should spend my very limited marketing time pinning (promoting) my competitors, (like other glassmakers or jewelry makers). Is that good business? Does it seem I’m sending people away from my info & products? I’m confused about what to pin?
Hi Priya, thank you for your comment. You’re raising a very important question. When I say to pin third party pins, try to think about which information will be helpful to your audience to support their buying decision. For example, this could be pinning articles about the different types of stones or jewelries, how to find which jewelry fits your type, etc. The idea is not to direct your customers away from you but to complement your service with additional information that will be helpful in the buying process. Additionally to that, I have recently experimented with reducing the number of third party pins I am pinning to my boards – with good results. I have been pinning 90% only my own pins lately an my impressions and clicks have remained stable. You could try that as well! Let me know if I can help with more questions 🙂
Thank you for your reply.