How To Increase Engagement With Pinterest SEO: A Guide

One of the great things about social media marketing is the fact that companies have so many options to choose from. Each platform comes with a built-in audience, and if you choose the right one, you’ll likely hit the exact target demographic you’re looking for.

However, the number of choices can also be a detriment. Too many options can be a bit overwhelming, leading companies to simply pick one of the more popular sites. While this strategy can be effective, it’s not as good as using a more niche social media platform that’ll fit your business’s products and services better.

If you have a crafty or creative style business, something like Pinterest will be perfect for you. However, people often misunderstand this platform, especially in terms of how they can utilize its SEO. In this guide, we’ll go over ways that you can increase your engagement with Pinterest’s SEO practices. That way, you can get the most out of this platform.

Understand How Pinterest SEO Works

Before you can truly begin working on your engagement, you need to understand the basics of how Pinterest SEO works. Generally, it’s very similar to how other search engines work, but it’s a bit more basic. This is important to know in order to use it. Here are the four pillars of Pinterest SEO:

• Pin quality: How well a specific pin performs on the site based on engagement and popularity.
• Pinner quality: How popular an account is when looking at engagement and activity.
• Domain quality: How good an account’s website is that links to the pins created.
• Topic relevance: How closely the keywords a company attaches to their pins match general search results.

The crucial thing to know about these SEO factors is that you must achieve them in different ways. The first two only work if you’ve already gained traction on the site. They won’t help new companies, but they’re great for snowballing your results after you’ve put in the work.

The third one doesn’t directly tie to Pinterest itself. Its basis comes more from the quality of your own site. That means you need to know how to do things like increase your landing page conversion rate for Pinterest to take notice of you.

The final factor is the main one that’ll help you out early on. Matching your pin’s keywords to relevant search topics will put you on the map, but we’ll get more into how to do that after you learn more about the basics of increasing engagement with Pinterest SEO.

Create or Update Your Profile

The key to finding success on this platform is creating a business account for it. A standard profile won’t give you access to the Pinterest Business Hub, which has the tools you need to increase your engagement. If you already have your company set up on a standard profile, that won’t be an issue because you can convert it into a business one.

After establishing your business account, it’s time to optimize it. This means uploading a company profile photo, including your name and “@” handle, linking your website, and writing a brief bio. These components will help your page look more official and attract potential customers to your brand.

Claim Your Website

Another thing to note here is that simply linking your website to your profile page isn’t the only thing you can do with it on this platform. You can also claim it. This allows Pinterest to keep track of all the click-throughs your pins receive, which will be helpful for later analytics on the site.

More importantly, though, you’ll also be able to track interactions from pins other users post that link your company’s website. Once you’ve gained a following, you won’t be the only one posting about your products or services. Other people will share that information too, and knowing how well it’s performing outside of your own profile is vital data to be able to access.

Discover Popular Trends

Before you even start posting on Pinterest, you need to get an idea of what’s popular. Doing your own thing is a good way to build individuality on this site, but you must have an audience to do that successfully first. That means, for now, you need to follow the trends.

Fortunately, the Pinterest Trends page allows you to look at the history of the top search terms used on the platform. Of course, you can go deeper than that with filters for top monthly and yearly trends, seasonal trends, and growing trends. You can also segment them by country or region and look into other demographical information, such as age, gender, and interest areas. Knowing this kind of information will help guide you toward the right audiences when you start posting your own pins.

Develop a Keyword Strategy

Once you have an idea of the types of trends you want to target, it’s time to develop a keyword strategy. You can do this by creating a campaign on your profile. By focusing on driving your pins’ consideration, you can select keywords you want to use for your campaign. Through your research on the trends page, you probably have a list of keywords you’d like to target.

By putting them in here, you can then create a list that you can reference when making pins in the future. You won’t need to use all of them in each pin, but having a comprehensive list showing each keyword’s monthly searches will help your overall engagement.

Find the Best Times To Post

Of course, using the right keywords is only half the battle. You also need to time your posts to reach the largest audience possible. Like other social media sites, newer posts will find more traction than older ones, so putting them out during high-traffic hours will get more people to notice them. While some of this comes down to the “guess-and-check” method, you can use your analytics to make more informed decisions on the best time to post.

If you can’t seem to nail the timing just right, increase your consistency. This will also help with this issue. The more you post, the more likely someone will find your content, regardless of whether or not it’s a peak time. Plus, consistency is great for bringing people back. The key to engagement is having repeat visitors since they’ll boost your popularity numbers and be more likely to buy something from your site.

Start Making Rich Pins

Now that you know the basics of targeting your specific audience through keywords and timing, you can actually start creating some content. While normal pins are the bread and butter of this site, as a business, you can also utilize rich pins that’ll gain more attention.

These types of pins automatically sync content from your website directly to your posts. Rich pins can range from recipes and articles related to what you sell to actual product and service pages that have pricing and availability information. Combining the usage of rich pins with normal ones will help fill out your content while not overdoing it on promotional materials.

Create or Utilize Boards

While you can post your pins in the general feed, one thing that makes Pinterest stand out is the usage of boards. These congregate similar pins together in a digestible format for people to explore. Creating your own boards that specifically focus on your products is a great way to develop a sense of customer loyalty. However, these aren’t the most effective at initially drawing people in.

To do that, you need to utilize group boards that already have popularity among the communities you want to target. These boards have built-in audiences that you can attract more easily. Just make sure the board is relevant to the products you offer. Posting in random group boards might do more harm than good since people will see it as a blatant marketing push.

It’s also important to know that you can pin the same post to multiple locations. Just make sure you pin it to the most relevant one first. Pinterest’s SEO algorithm prioritizes the first board you pin something to. If the board you use first isn’t relevant enough to your products or brand, you might attract the wrong target audience, hurting your overall engagement.

Implement Video Content

Finally, make sure you diversify your content, especially when using video format. Even though Pinterest largely focuses on pictures, video content on the platform has skyrocketed in recent years. You shouldn’t use videos in all your pins, but avoiding the format altogether will hurt your engagement results. Using videos strategically should result in a noticeable boon in your stats.