Pinterest Is a Search Engine! Optimizing Your Pins for Maximum Exposure

What started out as a fun lunch-break distraction has transformed into a veritable visual powerhouse. Pinterest has a reported 100 million monthly active users who have tacked up some 50 billion pins across 100 billion boards.

Are you using it to drive traffic to your website? To make sales? If so, is it working?

The key to using Pinterest effectively is understanding one key fact: Pinterest is a search engine. When you treat it as such, your pins will perform better, more people will discover your profile and you’ll ultimately get more traffic.

The Basics

Just like Google (or any search engine), Pinterest uses keywords to help find your pins and show them to users who are looking for them.

This is where casual Pinterest users make a critical error. They think that having a great-looking, compelling image is enough on its own. Or maybe they write a caption that makes sense to them, but no one else, like “OMG – for our master bedroom!”

But how can the robot that determines which pins to show in search results tell what your image is about if you don’t give it any context?

Oh wait, it can’t. That’s where keywords come in. Pinterest recently made some changes to the way it uses pin keywords and descriptions, but keywords–in my opinion–are just as important as ever if not more so.

Read on, as we discuss three key areas to optimize for Pinterest search and what types of language to use.

Your Profile

This is the small section with a photo and text blurb that appears above all of your boards on your profile page.

You likely filled out your profile when you first joined Pinterest and didn’t give it much thought after that. If this sounds familiar, you’ll want to go in and give your profile a fresh makeover.

The blurb in your profile should be a catch-all statement that describes what your boards are collectively about. In it, you’ll want to pepper in several keywords that are pertinent to your industry.

Here’s my current profile blurb, with the keywords in bold:

Helping small businesses excel through digital marketing, social media, blogging and PR. Based in beautiful West Palm Beach, Florida.

I could have just said something generic like “business consultant,” but that gives absolutely no context to the type of content you’ll find on my boards. With this description, Pinterest can tell my account is all about topics related to PR and marketing.

There’s an issue that might arise for you here: what if you use your Pinterest account to pin tons of different things, like products you sell, funny cat memes, vacation spots, and ideas for your sister’s wedding?

My advice here would be to keep your personal account personal, and set up a separate business account specifically for work-related pinning. This way, you can make your business profile laser-focused to drive traffic and leave the fun stuff for your personal account where traffic doesn’t really matter.

One more thing about your profile. You’ll notice I include my business directly in my profile name, and many popular pinners do this as well.

I haven’t been able to find any reliable evidence to say whether this has any impact on your pin performance; however, I think it’s one more way to let not only Pinterest’s algorithm, but users themselves, know exactly what your account is all about.

Your Boards

Once your profile is in order, it’s time to do the same cleanup on your actual Pinterest boards.

Each board should have its own description that takes it one level deeper than the description you wrote in your profile. You can edit this description by clicking the ‘Edit board’ button.

Besides giving your board a keyword-rich description, like you did with your profile, you’ll want to assign the board a proper category.

If there doesn’t seem to be a category that fits quite right, you can always select ‘Other.’

Your Pins

Finally, the most important place to optimize: your pins.

If you’re like me when I first started using Pinterest, I would click the ‘Pin it’ button and that was it. I wouldn’t change a thing about the pin before adding it to one of my boards.

This is a fatal flaw!

Pinterest (and other pinners) depend on your pin descriptions to understand why a pin is valuable. It’s your place to provide clues to what the pin is about, while also convincing the reader that it’s worth clicking on.

I recommend choosing two to three keywords that most capture what the pin is about, then incorporating those into your description.

Here’s an example:

The keywords here are copywriting, marketing and advertising. This simple, keyword-rich description has helped this pin become one of my most-shared.

There’s one more thing you can do to give your pins the best possible chance for Pinterest success: enable rich pins.

Rich pins include extra information about your website and content directly on the pin itself.

If the pin is a product, people can see real-time pricing and buy immediately. If the pin is a recipe, pinners will see the list of ingredients. There are six types of rich pins in all: app, movie, recipe, article, product and place.

To enable rich pins, you’ll need to enter a bit of code on your website’s back end. You can find full instructions for enabling rich pins here.

Once you get started on Pinterest it can be addicting, and even more so when to start to see the traffic it brings to your website. So get to work optimizing those pins and boards for Pinterest search!

To learn more about using Pinterest for marketing including a free list of group boards to join, check out this post.