Introdection
Hey everyone, Bilal here. Let’s talk about Pinterest SEO and how it can help you get more traffic for FREE from this platform. I’m consistently getting about 70k outbound clicks to my website from Pinterest account that has 10+ Million monthly viewers, I’ve been talking about Pinterest on this artical for about 7 years now, and this year I have some exciting NEW stuff to share, so stay tunned!
This artical might end up a bit longer than usual, so feel free to use timestamps to watch the parts of the artical which are the most interesting for you! Let’s start by definition of Pinterest SEO if you are new to this.
Pinterest search engine optimization
is similar to Google SEO. You optimize your pins so that when users search for specific keywords or topics, Pinterest shows your pins to them. For example, I could search here for “best vegetarian appetizers” and you’ll see that Pinterest is doing a pretty good job showing me mostly the pins that are about this exact topic. Now let’s move onto practical tips that you can use right now to improve your Pinterest SEO.
Optimization Starts On Your Pinterest Profile
Your optimization starts on your Pinterest profile level, then you will do SEO for your Pinterest boards, and then on individual pin level. It’s important to optimize on all three levels, starting with your Pinterest account. Because when someone makes a search for a specific keyword, they can also find your profile using this filter that shows only Profiles. Of course, your profile can only be found if you actually optimized it for this keyword.
So make sure you have the most important keywords in your profile name and description. First, if you are not using a business account on Pinterest, switch from Pinteret to a business account. It’s free and it has lots of advantages the main being that you will be compliant with Pinterest’s Terms of Service.
Account Setting
Then go to your account Settings, the first tab is to edit your profile. Your pin title is pretty short, so you need to only add here the most important keywords, starting perhaps with your brand, if you have one, and then with keywords. Your profile description can have up to 500 characters but keep in mind that only the first line or two will be visible, so again you want to put the most important keywords closer at the start of this description.
Your username should be either your brand or the main keyword you go after. It has to be short so it’s not always possible to find something perfect but you can try. Also, you can change username later with zero damage to your account.
Add WordPress HTML Code
So don’t overthink it. Then you need to claim your website URL, or you also have an option to verify a Shopify store with a free app. To verify any other platforms and types of websites except Shopfy, you just need to click on claim your website. To do this, go to your Pinterest settings, click on ‘Claim,’ and follow the steps to claim your website.
For those using WordPress, you can choose the option to add this HTML code in the head section of your site. And to do this you could use the WPCode free plugin (formerly called ‘Insert Headers and Footers‘) to add the required code to your site’s header. Don’t worry; it’s a simple copy-paste process that will help you easily add the code in the head section on almost any WordPress theme.
Or you could use any SEO plugin on WordPress – it could be AIOSEO, Yoast SEO or RankMath – all of them allow you to add the Pinterest code for website verification. For example, in Rank Math to find this you’ll go to General Settings, then click on Webmaster tools, and here you’ll find among other tools, the field for Pinterest verification code. Claiming your website on Pinterest boosts your account’s authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of Pinterest, so it’s an essential step to optimize your account.
kickstart your Pinterest SEO
So go ahead and claim your website to kickstart your Pinterest SEO from the beginning. Pinterest Boards SEO Now let’s move to the next level – it’s your Pinterest boards. How do we optimize them? One of the first things you want to do is make sure you have a good board title and description that includes some keywords related to your niche.
New Account
When I work on this step on a new account, I start doing competitor research. You can do it for free using Pinterest’s filter to find most popular Profiles in your niche. Have a look at their boards and pins, make a list of topics that they used as board titles. Or you can save some time and use PinClicks – this is the new tool I added to my SEO process on Pinterest this year.
If you know about Google SEO, probably you have a list of SEO tools on your mind. But for Pinterest there was pretty much nothing on the market for many years. A few Pinterest keyword tools that existed would get search volume for keywords from Google so it was still not fully reflecting the situation with search on Pinterest.
Setting Up your Pinterest Account
When you are setting up your Pinterest account, you are spending most of the time doing keyword research and competitor research. So in my opinion THIS is the best time to use the 5-day FREE trial of Pinclicks which you can get through my affiliate link in the description below. If you use my link, I will get a commission at no extra cost to you.
This is a free way for you to support my channel but of course it’s totally up to you if you want to use it. You can basically spy on your competitors – just find a few profiles in your niche that you think are doing great – maybe they have high monthly viewers, maybe you like the way their pins look. Then insert their username here in Pinclicks in the tab Account Explorer. And now we can see a lot of data that’s not available on Pinterest publicly.
Now you can see which keywords this account ranks for, which are their top pins and soon they will add the top boards list as well. If you already have a website or blog, the best way to go about your board titles is to create at least one board for each category on your site. To create a board, first go here to the Saved tab – that’s where your boards will be located.
Find this red Plus button on the right side, and Create a board – here it ask only for the board title first. It should be short and focused on one keyword. Generally my advice on Pinterest is do not go after narrow and long-tail keywords, especially in your board titles. Boards are supposed to be collections of ideas related to a specific theme. As a collection of ideas, it should be broad enough to allow to save there multiple pins targeting more granular level related keywords.
Once your board is created, click on these 3 dots to to the Board settings and here you can add a board description. You have up to 500 characters here, so you can include many related keywords. To find them you can use Pinterest’s search bar suggestions and these suggestions below the search bar in the colorful boxes. Then you can copy some of these keywords and use any AI Text generator, even free ChatGPT will do the job – to generate a board description that includes these keywords naturally.
Recommend New Account
The next step I recommend to all new accounts is to save popular pins that already rank high for the focus keyword on each board. This will help you bring the right keyword context to each new board. You can’t see this on Pinterest, but most of the popular pins have these keywords or annotations attached to them. Pinclicks actually is the only tool that shows all the annotations for the pins.
I am only showing this to you so that you know that indeed Pinterest attaches some keywords to pins and when you start saving these popular pins to your boards, you help Pinterest algorithm understand what your boards are about – in less time. You shouldn’t save hundreds of pins in a day if you created multiple boards.
If you want to create 5 new boards today, you could save about 10 pins to each board and call it a day, then come back the next day and continue repinning from others until you have at least 20-30 pins on each new board. Now if you want to dive deeper into this topic of Pinterest SEO, I have a free on-demand class, I will drop a link to it in the description below.
You can watch it once we are done with this video. I also have a paid Pinterest course, it’s totally up to you if you want to join – the best part about it is that you get access to me and can send me your questions and doubts in a FB community for members of the program only. You’ll find the link to the course below this video as well.
Keyword Research On Pinterest Personally
I now do most of my keyword research for Pinterest in Pinclicks. Let’s try searching for a broad and popular keyword like Home decor ideas. When you search this, you’ll see even more keyword suggestions pop up. You’ll also notice a red scale that shows how relatively popular each keyword is. Now, here’s something most people don’t know.
Pinterest recently started showing search volumes on specific Ideas pages. These pages are a bit hidden and have unique URLs. For example, take a look at this Ideas page: Home decor ideas bathroom. You’ll see it shows about 2,000 monthly searches. You can sometimes stumble upon these pages by navigating through Pinterest’s Topics section, but finding all of them manually is nearly impossible.
That’s where PinClicks comes in. They’ve done the hard work for you by collecting over 10 million of these pages — also called Interests. You can explore them using the Interest Explorer tab in PinClicks. It’s a huge time-saver for finding keywords with search volumes directly from Pinterest. Another kind of data that we never had access to before Pinclicks is tracking our website positions in Pinterest search.
You know, there are lots of Google SEO tools can show how your pages rank for specific keywords. We never had a tool that would track our website’s positions for keywords on Pinterest. But now we have – go to the tab called…Rank Tracker. PinClicks is currently the only tool that lets you track your rankings on Pinterest for logged-out users.
This means your personal search history doesn’t influence the results. Each ranking comes with a date, showing a snapshot of where your site stood at that time. Keep in mind, rankings often fluctuate. Pinterest updates its algorithm frequently, so it’s normal for pins to drop and then regain their positions.PinClicks handles these updates automatically, so you don’t need to refresh manually. If you want to
Learn How To Use Pinclicks
I actually added a whole detailed tutorial about this tool to my course, so you are welcome to join, use the link in the description below. Or if you are already a member, you just need to login and check the SEO module to watch the new lessons. SEO for your Pins Now let’s move to the next level – it’s SEO for your pins. Keep in mind that Pinterest often is testing different interfaces on different accounts at the same time.
I have one account with an old interface that doesn’t have a few features in Pinterest pin creation tool, but since these features are missing they probably are just optional anyway. When you create a pin, you will be asked as a minimum to add: Title: Up to 100 characters, but focus on the first 40 — make sure your main keyword is there. Description: Up to 500 characters. Aim for at least 100 and include 3–4 keyword variations in the first 100 characters.
Alt Text
Optional but helpful for accessibility. Write a short description of the pin content. Now, I don’t remember last time when I wrote these titles and descriptions without the help of ChatGPT. What I added to my process lately because of Pinclicks I can find top performing pins, choose the one with the highest score, then check all annotations and Interests related to the main keyword I am trying to rank for.
I can copy all these keywords with a couple of clicks and add them to the prompt in ChatGPT as additional keywords I want to see in my pin title and description. If you schedule the pin here on Pinterest, you will also be able to add some popular keywords as tags to your pins. If you schedule pins through a third-party tool, this feature will not be available but again, it’s optional.
It won’t break your pins if you don’t have these tags. For all types of pins remember the main rule is that we always want to save each pin first to the most relevant board. You can later save it to about 2 more relevant boards, but the first pin should be saved to the perfectly relevant board for the topic of this pin.
Example:
a pin about the Best Vegetarian Spring Recipes First board: Vegetarian Recipes Second could be: Spring Food Third could be: Healthy Recipes Now I’d like to answer some .
FAQ
About Pinterest SEO: Do you need to use hashtags on Pinterest? No, hashtags are not necessary anywhere (board descriptions or pin descriptions). You can totally skip them. Adding a few hashtags to your pin descritpion won’t hurt either, but they will be treated as normal keywords anyway. Can you add a list of keywords separated by comma to create pin descriptions or board descriptions faster? No, you shouldn’t keyword stuff in board descriptions and pin descriptions. It’s clearly stated in the Community Guidelines on Pinterest.
Can You Save Pins to Multiple Boards? Yes, you can save a pin to up to 3 relevant boards, but space them out — wait about a week between saves to avoid looking repetitive. If a board’s title has keywords missing from your pin, you don’t have to but you could update the pin title to better match that new board. – Are Group Boards Worth It? No, they’re not.
For the past several years, Pinterest favors fresh content and regular boards over group boards. Even large group boards with thousands of followers rarely generate impressions anymore due to reduced distribution. Focus on saving pins to your own relevant boards for better results. If you have never heard about group boards, don’t even waste time googling what it is, they are utterly useless on the platform these days.
Now, a quick reminder. Although Pinterest SEO is very important, you can’t overlook pin design and click-through rates. Check out the video I linked up there to learn how to get more clicks from each pin that you save on Pinterest! I’ll see you there!
