How To SEO Optimize Your Pins For Pinterest

In my years of blogging, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. One of those was not utilizing Pinterest correctly in order to bring my blog traffic. Luckily, I have seen the light and found tremendous growth in Pinterest. There are a lot of “schools of thought” on Pinterest and how to make the most of it. I am not going to sit here and tell you that there is a right and wrong way to grow your presence and pageviews through Pinterest, but I am going to share with you what works for me.

The biggest thing? SEO FOR PINTEREST. Crazy talk, right? We’re told to SEO Optimize our posts. Put keywords and descriptions and yadda yadda yadda… and for Pinterest, you’re supposed to make a really cool mind-blowing vertical graphic, pin it, and the visual will make it go viral. Right? Not quite.

Pinterest is a search engine. And everything there is based on keywords. Think about it. How many times have you used Pinterest instead of Google? I don’t know about you, but I use the search function in Pinterest almost daily.

The key here is to make your pins, boards, and profile show up in Pinterest searches.

I would definitely do your research in optimizing your own profile, verifying your website, enabling rich pins, and using descriptive keywords in your boards, in your profile, and in your pins. This is a great article on SEO for Pinterest that breaks those points down for you, if you have some Pinterest remedial work to do. I’ll wait here while you get your crap together.

Anyway, do I have any business talking about Pinterest? Who knows. Perhaps not. I’m no expert. But I do know that I have continual viral pins that bring me substantial traffic. It’s doubled my pageviews in one year. Let me break it down a little further.

My most popular post, The Best Cheap Makeup, has been pinned over 400,000 times. I wrote that post just under a year ago. In one month, my Drugstore Makeup Dupes has been pinned over 3,000 times. My Ultimate Makeup Capsule has been pinned 20,000 times since June. My posts and pins get continual traffic.

Most importantly, my pins come up at the top when you search for specific things. Let’s do a few Pinterest searches, shall we?

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“best drugstore makeup” — Oh, hey. First pin. Not pinned by me.

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“drugstore mascara” — First pin. Didn’t even have to type in “best drugstore mascara.” (Although if you do, I’m still the first pin.) Again, not pinned by me.

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“makeup” — Apparently you don’t even have to be specific for my pins to show up on Pinterest. You can type in “makeup” and I’m the 10th pin.

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“makeup dupe” — Ah, look here. We’ve got two of my pins that show up as the 7th and 9th results. Dupes are pretty saturated on Pinterest, but somehow I managed to be at the top of those results.

So, how did I do it? Well, a couple of things.

1. CREATE A GREAT GRAPHIC THAT TAKES UP A LOT OF SPACE IN PINTEREST, ADDRESSES A SPECIFIC NEED, AND ENCOURAGES CLICK THROUGHS.

I pinned this two weeks ago, so that is why it only has 4 repins. I didn’t realize how big this image would blow up, but now that I look at it, it has a lot of things going for it. It:

– Addresses a specific need. When I wrote the post, I thought of friends and family who are at the drugstore and had no idea where to even start, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money.

– It encourages a click through to the post because I don’t tell the specific names and brands of the products. Those budget dollar amounts make us go “Huh… what’s that for $2.99? I need it!”

– It is an extra long vertical image. The actual dimensions of this are 736 x 1750 pixels. I have heard that going up to 1800 is ideal, but I didn’t know that at the time I made this graphic. It’s that long because I needed to fit all my favorite stuff on it!! Haha!

2. SEO OPTIMIZE THE CRAP OUT OF YOUR PINS.

This is the big thing here. BIG THING. If you skim through the rest of this post, fine, BUT DON’T HERE. Haha. After you have done some keyword research and know what you want to target, optimize that shiz.

Nobody is going to see that amazing graphic and post if there are no keywords in the pin description. You absolutely cannot rely on your graphic to make you blow up. When I originally pinned my Best Cheap Makeup pin, I captioned the pin, “The Best Cheap Makeup – give yourself a total beauty wardrobe with products under $10!” I pinned it again with the caption, “Best drugstore makeup, best makeup under $10.” I pinned it another time with both descriptions. Those are keyword-rich descriptions.

Try is using different pin descriptions when you pin them. This is a little more time consuming, but I know that it works since it worked so well with my Best Cheap Makeup pin. We want these pins to show up in search results. The best part about this is your pins don’t need to be repinned to bring you traffic! If they’re at the top of the search, people will click on them (and hopefully love you and be a subscriber and long time fan)!

3. PIN THEM OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

If you pin your post only once and never come back, you are doing yourself a great disservice. Pin them again to different boards. Pin them to group boards. Participate in pinning groups with your blogger friends, to ensure your content is being pinned by other people. Remember how those search results showed nothing that I actually pinned? Those are repins or pins directly off that blog post. Your content won’t be seen if you don’t continually push it out there. You can also buy Pinterest Followers.

Well, I know this post was extremely long winded, but thank you for humoring me and reading it. I hope these tips help bring you growth on Pinterest and on your website! Are you liking my blog tips posts? If so, let me know and I will keep them coming!

Meg O. – Author – Thanks for this great article!