The Ultimate Pinterest SEO Guide

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You’ve optimized every part of your website – but have you checked your Pinterest SEO potential? Learn how to use Pinterest to increase your search ranking and drive traffic to your site.

It’s no secret that SEO is an extremely important part of any marketing mix.  The right keywords, linking to the right content, shared to the right sites, help your domain rank higher in search. However, there’s probably a valuable tool for traffic that you haven’t thought of – Pinterest SEO. By applying a few tweaks to your Pinterest profile, pins and website, you can easily take advantage of Pinterest’s viral nature and recieve the SEO bump you’ve been looking for.

Your Profile

• The key to Pinterest SEO value starts above your entire profile – in the URL. Choosing the right username is much like choosing the right website domain; it should be straightforward, but it’s not.  Not only do you have to beware of other users who have potentially stolen your company name, you also must beware of the 15 charater limit imposed on usernames.  If your company name is already taken – or if your name is too long – HubSpot suggests choosing a memorable, easy-to-spell keyword related to your business.  For example, Martha Stewart Weddings in the Middle Eastused “MSWeddingsME” for their username so they could include the valuable keyword, “weddings,” in the name while differentiating themselves from the other Martha Stewart accounts.
• Although you have more freedom with your profile name, it’s still important to keep it simple.  Don’t try and be cute; just stick with your company name! Using the CEO’s name, marketing manager name or any other person’s name makes it nearly impossible for users to find you via search.
• You have 200 characters in the about me section, so use them wisely.  Check out your Google Analytics to see what drives people to your site to decide what keywords and phrases should be used. Just make sure to keep it easy to read and not overly “keyword-y.”.
• Do you now the name of the file used for your profile picture? If it reads something like “logo3.png,”, then it’s time to update! Even though it’s not visible to the typical consumer, the file name of your profile image affects alt text and image search results.  Rename the file to your company name, company slogan or anything else descriptive of your company.
• Are you a local business? No problem. Pinterest is still a great SEO opportunity for you. Use the location place on your profile to show where you are, (avoiding less-known abbreviations for your town is a good idea here). Using some of those 200 characters in the “About me” section for local keywords wouldn’t hurt, either.  For instance, since PinLeague is based in Oklahoma City, we could include “Okie” “Thunder” “OKC”, etc. in our description to find local traffic.

Your Boards and Pins

• Pinterest provides you with some basic board names when you sign up, like “My Style” or “Places & Spaces”, but who’s going to search for that?  Using keywords relevant to your company, create boards with unique, relevant titles under 20 characters. Each board has its own 500 character description available where you can write a keyword-rich narrative about the board topic. Having boards related to topics of interest to your audience helps both current and future fans find you in search.
• Pinterest categories can be your best friend when it comes to promoting your boards.  During the board creation process, there is an option to select which Pinterest category the board belongs in. Once a category is selected, pins pinned to your board have the opportunity to show up on those category pages, allowing them to be seen and shared by any Pinterest user.
• Your pins are yet another opportunity to squeeze in some relevant keywords. When pinning from your own site, it’s good to include the full link (shortened links may be considered spam), as well as relevant keywords in the description. Also, don’t think you can slack when repinning content! By throwing in a few keywords relevant to your company, you can potentially attract your target user through search.

Your Website

• First off – VERIFY YOUR WEBSITE! It’s a super easy, super powerful way to help boost your profile in search results.  Verification also tells users that it is you, not an impostor.  Learn how to easily verify your website from the Pinterest blog.
• Another easy, but powerful, tool to utilize in growing your traffic from Pinterest is to include Pin It buttons on all your images.  These buttons provide automatic links back to your site as soon as they’re used. The easier you make it on the user, the more links you will receive.
• Just like with your profile picture, you need to pay attention to your image file names on your website. Make sure they’re relevant and keyword-rich, so when a user pins from your site you receive all the benefits from the shared link.
• Perhaps the most important thing you can do to optimize your website is understanding what resonates with your Pinterest audience.  Through tools like PinLeague’s Pinterest Analytics Suite, you can see which pins are trending, what phrases are most often used in descriptions and how many pins have occurred from your site, among many other valuable site features. By paying attention to what your fans love, you can build related content to drive traffic back to your website.

Your Interactions

• Connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts to your Pinterest account is a great way to cross-promote your brand following. By simply posting on Twitter or Facebook about your Pinterest presence, users who are already fans of your brand know to follow you on Pinterest as well. Having a strong social presence connected to your website signifies to Google that you’re a trusted source of information, giving you a nice SEO bump.
• To send traffic to your site, you must interact with your audience! Repin, comment and like others pins. Building relationships over Pinterest will, in turn, create an engaged following willing to share your content to others. After all, at the end of the day, your fans are the best tool in your marketing toolkit.

What social media SEO tips have worked for you? 

This post was originally featured on the PinLeague Blog as a The Ultimate Pinterest SEO Guide.

Source Article URL:

http://pinleague.com/pinterest-seo/

How to Search Engine Optimize Your Pinterest Page

I’ve noticed that Pinterest isn’t just dominating the social media scene, but it’s starting to dominate quite a few of Google’s search engine results.

Many brands and online marketers are missing the opportunity to rank high forlong-tail keywords through the use of Pinterest.

What are long tail keywords? I’m going borrow the definition of a long tail keyword from an article from Search Engine Watch:

Essentially, long-tail keywords are less popular keywords because they have less search volume and less competition to rank for. Consider the following two examples: “home remedies for bed bugs” or “how to get rid of depression.” These are each considered long-tail keywords as compared to trying to rank for the much more competitive search terms “bed bugs” or “depression”.

Why would you want to use Pinterest to rank higher for keywords?

Some long tail keywords may have low competition but your website may be new and find it hard to compete for them still. The good news is that you can piggy back off of Pinterest since it is a strong domain authority site.

A strong domain authority allows for pages to show up higher on search results for relevant searches. This gives your business more visibility and higher chances of people clicking on your Pinterest. If you have some great visual content on that particular board, then it will help drive web traffic to your business website or e-commerce site.

How do you exactly use Pinterest to rank higher for the keywords you want? Here are three tactics for marketers that want to get their Pinterest page, and boards, to rank higher in search engine results.

1) Name Your Boards with Long Tail Keywords

If there’s a long tail keyword that you would like to rank well for in Google, consider naming your board with that particular keyword without sacrificing the brand.

For example the keyword, funny advertisements, has an estimated global search on Google of about 2,900 times a month for that exact term. When I type in that keyword on Google, there is only one Pinterest board specifically titled as “Funny Advertisements” that shows up on the first page of results. At the time of this writing, it was the only Pinterest board that uses that exact keyword, which is why it ranked so high. There was no competition from other pinners.

The exact url of that board looks like this:

pinterest.com/appltncre8ve/funny-advertisements

With the board containing the keyword and also having low competition, that specific Pinterest board is on the first page of Google. When I searched for it, it was ranked number 6 in the first page of results. And yes that’s my article on 17 Funny Advertisements that’s ranked number 4.

Pinterest allows you to create up to 350 boards, though I don’t recommend you maxing the number of boards for the sake of SEO. I would suggest no more than 20 to start off since it can be time consuming to manage all. This allows you to compete in Google for 20 + additional keywords that may be harder for your own website to compete with.

2) Ensure Your Board Descriptions are Keyword Rich

One of the biggest pet peeves I have about brands that use Pinterest is their sheer laziness to fill in the description of their Pinterest boards.

This is one of the Pinterset boards from Starbucks titled, “Real Food.” From an SEO perspective, titling the board Real Food isn’t the best since most people are not searching up the term for real food. However, the name of the board needs to be aligned with a company’s brand, and it’s understandable they titled it Real Food.

What’s an absolutely travesty is that the description of the board is left blank. This can easily be corrected when you click on the edit button on the board, and to fill out the description with keywords. To help with their search engine optimization, Starbucks could have stated in the description:

“Delicious Starbucks pastries, sandwiches, and food that we love. Our board also contains some of our favourite foods and pastries that we would love to try and eat.”

This would have helped their Pinterest board be found for keywords such as Starbucks pastries, Starbucks sandwiches, and Starbucks foods on Google and other search engines.

Starbucks isn’t the only one that’s guilty of this, many social media blogs tout how great Whole Foods is using their Pinterest page, which they are when it comes to posting visual content, but when I clicked on four random boards of theirs, not one single one of them had their descriptions filled in.

Always fill in the descriptions of your Pinterest boards with keywords that your business wants to rank for.

3)Put Keywords Into Pin Descriptions

This technique most likely isn’t going to get you anywhere close to the first page of Google results for keywords, though it is possible depending on the search term, but it is still an excellent practice as it can help your Pinterest boards show up on the second and third page of Google search results for keywords.

Ensure that keywords that you want to rank for are in the pin’s description, as Google search engines do crawl the descriptions of pins, and takes it into consideration for search results. The website that shows up in the search engines for those pin descriptions will not lead directly to that specific pin’s address, instead it will be list the Pinterest Board’s url on which the pin is located.

A specific pin’s url will look like this:
http://pinterest.com/pin/246290673344396313/

And a board address looks like this:
http://pinterest.com/mcngmarketing/pinterest-tips/

Here’s an example of how this works. I typed into Google the following words, “Funny pins on Pinterest.”

Here are the first six results that showed up for my search:

The determining factor that the Pinterset board, 1000 repins, showed up on the first page of the results because of a single pin’s description. The actual board name doesn’t contain any of the search words, nor the actual description of the board itself, but because one of the pins had contained the words “Funny” in it, it was able to show up as result number 6 for the search words “Funny pins on Pinterest.”

In order to maximize your Pinterest page and boards on Google, ensure that your social media marketing team isn’t taking short cuts. Have the boards titled after long tail keywords that your organization wants to rank well for, as well as ensuring that descriptions are keyword rich.

Do you have any suggestions or tips on how to rank your Pinterest page higher in search engines?

GE