If you want to market your business on Pinterest, you have to understand Pinterest SEO.
As a search-driven platform that often gets categorized with social media platforms, Pinterest is often overlooked and misunderstood. In truth, Pinterest is a uniquely powerful marketing tool for business owners looking to increase their visibility and drive more traffic, leads, and sales!
However, because SEO is one of those topics that can seem intimidatingly complex from the outside, you may not be sure of how to best utilize Pinterest SEO to get the best results from the platform. That’s what I’m here for.
In this comprehensive guide to Pinterest SEO, you’ll learn how Pinterest’s search engine works, including the basics of Pinterest SEO, how to do keyword research, creating optimized pins, how to evaluate your SEO performance, and common mistakes to avoid.
Pinterest as a Search Engine
Is Pinterest a Social Media Platform or Search Engine?
The oft-quoted tagline of Pinterest is that it’s a search engine, not a social media platform. But it’s kind of both. There are social media-esque features like following and engagement, but the real differentiation comes in how the Pinterest algorithm works.
In short, the way content is distributed on Pinterest is much more dependent on user’s searches than their following, which is why Pinterest SEO is so important for visibility.
Pinterest SEO vs. Google SEO
Most education and content about search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing your website content for Google’s search engine. There are multiple different facets and things to consider for Google SEO.
Pinterest SEO is much more simple, thankfully! The primary thing you need to think about for Pinterest SEO is the keywords you use. Other than that, you don’t really have to worry about domain authority or backlinks or website speed or any of that!
Why Pinterest’s Search-Based Algorithm Matters for Businesses
Soooo Pinterest is more search engine than social media. So what? The biggest benefit to brands marketing on Pinterest is that as a search engine, a new business has nearly equal opportunity to get their content seen as an older, more established business.
Your visibility and traffic doesn’t depend on how many followers you have, it depends on how good your Pinterest SEO is. And while that can be a huge boon to newer brands looking for more sustainable marketing strategies, it also underlines the importance of understanding and implementing Pinterest SEO.
The Foundations of Pinterest SEO
What is Pinterest SEO?
Pinterest SEO, or Pinterest search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your Pinterest content for the platform’s search engine by using relevant keywords.
What are Pinterest keywords?
Pinterest keywords are simply the words and phrases that users are searching on Pinterest. Your goal is to describe your content using those keywords so that Pinterest can distribute your content to the people who are looking for it.
What does Pinterest look at for SEO?
Since the Pinterest algorithm is just an intelligently coded system of computers, it tries to gather as much information about a given piece of content as possible.
That means you need to be thinking about Pinterest SEO for way more than just your individual pins.
Profile Optimization
Your Pinterest profile is just as searchable as your content, so you need to be optimizing it with relevant keywords. The most important place to include a keyword is in your profile title, but you should also include keywords in your Pinterest bio!
Board Optimization
Your Pinterest boards are another often overlooked component of Pinterest SEO. The board you pin something to adds additional SEO context to help Pinterest understand your content better.
When optimizing your boards for Pinterest SEO, make sure you have a keyword-optimized board title, keyword-rich board description, and that the other pins on the board all match the topic.
Looking at the boards you have overall on your account, try as much as possible to keep them relevant to your business and content. We don’t want to confuse Pinterest by having dozens of different unrelated boards.
Other Factors in Pinterest SEO
While the main components of how you can master Pinterest SEO are your profile, boards, and pins, there are some off-Pinterest things to consider!
Things like your image file names, URLs, and the content on your website might all have a small impact on how Pinterest understands and distributes your content. If you want to learn more about those, here’s a list of 11 places you should be using your Pinterest keywords.
Speaking of keywords… let’s talk about how to figure out which keywords to even use in the first place!
Keyword Research for Pinterest SEO
Doing keyword research is the first step I recommend anyone marketing on Pinterest do, even before optimizing your account or creating pins. You need to know what keywords to use before you even start that!
Luckily, just like Pinterest SEO is a lot simpler than Google SEO, keyword research for Pinterest is a lot simpler, too!
How to Find Keywords on Pinterest
You can do all of your Pinterest keyword research within Pinterest itself. Honestly, there isn’t a better tool outside of Pinterest’s own database that I would recommend! (There is a tool that can speed up this process, but I’ll get to that in a second.)
The main ways I would recommend looking for keywords on Pinterest include the Pinterest search bar and Pinterest Trends.
When you start typing a word or phrase into the Pinterest search bar, Pinterest will try to auto-complete your search with suggested phrases. These phrases are based on what Pinterest users are actually searching for, which makes it an excellent source of insight into what users want to know and how they’re looking for that information.
You can type in any relevant word or phrase into the search bar to generate dozens of long-tail, highly searched keywords for your Pinterest content!
You can do the same on Pinterest Trends, but instead of seeing suggested searches, you can see a historical search volume for that specific keyword or phrase. Doing keyword research on Pinterest Trends can sometimes be a bit limited if you don’t have a super popular or seasonal niche, but it’s always worth checking out in my opinion!
Using Pin Inspector to Speed Up Your Keyword Research
Typing all of your possible keywords into the search bar and copying them down manually can be a bit of a time suck, I won’t lie. That’s where a tool like Pin Inspector really speeds up my workflow.
What Pin Inspector does — among many other functions — is automates the keyword research process. You type in the “seed” keyword you want to find long-tail keywords for, and it uses data from Pinterest itself to compile a list of keywords.
From there, you can select all of the keywords or just the ones that are most relevant, and copy them over to your keyword bank.
The software itself is $47, but as a one-time fee for something that saves me literal hours on Pinterest keyword research? Totally worth it.
How to Organize Your Pinterest Keywords
I mentioned transferring the keywords into a keyword bank, which I recommend if you’re trying to improve your Pinterest SEO! Doing your keyword research in advance and keeping track of which keywords you want to use and rank for will save time when creating pins and make sure you’re working consistently towards your visibility goals.
Your Pinterest keyword bank doesn’t have to be anything fancy or complex; it could be as simple as a sheet of paper with words on it! However, in a digital age, I prefer to keep my keyword banks online in either a Google Sheet or an Airtable base.
The way I organize my Pinterest keywords is as follows:
- Overall topic
- Seed keyword
- Long-tail keywords
- Seed keyword
As a Pinterest manager for creative entrepreneurs, I found myself working in a few industries over and over again. Things like web design, branding, social media, copywriting, etc.
Because of that, I decided to share my experience & resources with you! Keyword research is the foundation of Pinterest SEO, and I don’t want it to be the thing that keeps you from succeeding on Pinterest.
I have over a dozen pre-researched, pre-organized Pinterest keyword banks available in the Newsstand, my shop of Pinterest marketing resources. These are the keywords I know will help your content get seen, because I’ve used them for my own clients!
You can shop the whole collection here.
How to Optimize Your Pins for SEO
While the foundation of your Pinterest SEO comes from your keyword research, profile optimization, and boards, the majority of day-to-day Pinterest search optimization you’ll do comes in the individual pins themselves.
There are three primary locations to optimize your pins:
- Pin titles
- Pin descriptions
- Pin images
1. In Your Pin Titles
Your pin titles should be straightforward and compelling, prioritizing a main keyword (or two) that relates to the subject of the pin.
Bonus Pinterest SEO Tip: If you have extra room in your pin title, include the board title you’ll be pinning to in the pin title! This keyword match is the stuff of Pinterest SEO dreams!
2. In Your Pin Descriptions
With 500 characters available, your pin descriptions are one of the best places to pack in as many keywords as possible! However, you want to do this without keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing refers to just loading the description with a string of keywords without context. (And the same applies if you’re just using hashtags.)
Your pin descriptions should be descriptive (duh), relevant, and keyword-rich. Typically, I aim to include at least 5 keywords in each description, including the main keyword from the pin title, and long-tail variations of that keyword.
3. In Your Pin Images
Unless you’re just pinning an image without any text on it, you should be optimizing your pin images for Pinterest SEO, too! Since Pinterest is a visual search engine, the algorithm will actually scan your pin image for any text it can “read”.
When designing your pin graphics, try to include a relevant keyword in the text overlay to give Pinterest even more SEO data to work with!
Common Pinterest SEO Mistakes
We’ve already covered two of the most common Pinterest SEO mistakes — keyword stuffing and neglecting your board optimization — but there are a few others you should avoid!
Relying on hashtags instead of keywords
In 2024, I don’t recommend using hashtags on Pinterest. You’re better off sticking to relevant long-tail keywords, written naturally throughout your description, instead of hashtags.
Pinterest users don’t really search for hashtags, so it makes more sense to use the keywords users already search for.
Pinning inconsistently
The more frequently you pin, the more opportunities you give Pinterest to learn about your content. If you stop pinning, only pin every once in a while, or completely ghost your Pinterest account, you risk Pinterest marking your account as “inactive.”
While this isn’t technically a Pinterest SEO mistake specifically, pinning inconsistently can absolutely impact your pins’ visibility in Pinterest’s search results.
Pinning irrelevant content
Another way you might accidentally confuse the Pinterest algorithm is by pinning content that isn’t aligned with the majority of your account. You’re likely to see the best success with Pinterest if you stick to content within a similar niche.
For example, if you were trying to pin about both travel tips and website templates, Pinterest won’t really understand how to categorize your content. Only one of the topics is likely to perform well, if either of them do at all.
A similar SEO mistake on Pinterest is pinning content to an irrelevant board. Remember, Pinterest uses the board details to further understand the pins, so you don’t want to metaphorically muddy the waters by saving pins to boards they don’t belong in.
Using a link that isn’t relevant to the pin
By this point, hopefully it’s clear that relevance is a big component of Pinterest SEO! Just like you want your keywords and boards and topics to be relevant, you also want to make sure wherever you’re directing your pin link makes sense.
It may seem like you can “trick” the Pinterest algorithm if you just use all the right keywords, but it’s not that easy. Pinterest doesn’t want to provide a bad user experience. If someone clicks on a pin expecting one thing and lands on a completely different page, they’re going to be annoyed and bounce right back to Pinterest.
That kind of interaction is classified as a “short click” and indicates to the Pinterest algorithm that it was an unsatisfying user experience.
Where this comes into play for most business owners is if you’re repurposing content from another platform, like Instagram or TikTok, and trying to link it back to your website. While I do recommend that, the caveat is that the website link needs to be relevant to the pin content!
How to Know If Your Pinterest SEO is Working
Okay, so now that you know the best practices for Pinterest SEO, mistakes to avoid, and how to find your Pinterest keywords, how do you know you’re doing it all “right”?
There are a few different tactics you can use to evaluate if Pinterest is correctly categorizing your content. Because that’s really what we’re looking for to make sure your Pinterest SEO is effective. You can’t control how users interact with the content, but you can make sure that at the very least, it’s reaching the right people.
Here are 3 different ways you can check if your Pinterest SEO is working:
1. Check the “More Like This” section under the individual pin
Those suggested pins should be mostly related to your pin’s content and visual style. If they’re not, or they’re all over the place, this could indicate that Pinterest doesn’t really understand your pin.
If you’ve just recently published this pin, it might not be accurate yet because it takes some time for Pinterest to fully index and annotate your pin! Check back in a few weeks.
2. Open your pin in an incognito browser
Opening pins in a private or incognito browser allows you to see the keywords and categories Pinterest has assigned to your pin.
If they aren’t right, you might need to go in and refresh your keyword strategy and make sure you’re including enough keywords in your pin titles and descriptions.
You don’t need to go and update already published pins. Instead, focus on pins you publish in the future!
3. Search for your target keywords in an incognito browser
If you know a few keywords you really want your content to show up in, search those keywords in Pinterest and see if your pins are there!
We’re doing this in incognito mode again so that your own browsing history doesn’t impact the way the search results show up.
Next Steps to Keep Improving Your Pinterest SEO
By now, you should have a solid understanding of how Pinterest SEO works and how you can leverage it to get more visibility and traffic to your business. From optimizing your profile and pins to doing thorough keyword research, every component of Pinterest SEO plays a crucial role in your Pinterest success.
If you want to learn more about Pinterest SEO with a comprehensive keyword research and implementation tutorial, I highly recommend Levee Road Studio’s Rank Boost course. Amy is my go-to Pinterest educator and teaches Pinterest in a way that’s equally approachable for beginners and valuable for long-time Pinterest users!
As you start to implement these Pinterest SEO tips, I encourage you to experiment as much as possible! There’s no one single right way to do Pinterest, and the more things you try, the more quickly you’ll be able to find what works for you and your brand.
With the right approach, foundation, and time, you can turn this platform into a reliable source of traffic, leads, and sales!
If we haven’t met yet, hiiii! I’m Sarah — Pinterest marketer for creative entrepreneurs, service providers, and talented people doing cool things! Here are some other ways to learn from me if we’re vibing…
>> Subscribe to The Thursday Press for weekly editions of Pinterest marketing tips and sometimes-too-real business insights delivered to your digital doorstep — ahem, inbox — every Thursday!
>> Grab your free Pinterest Checklist so you know everything you need to do to market yourself on Pinterest (and nothing you don’t)!
>> Join the waitlist for the upcoming Pinterest SEO workshop, where you’ll learn exactly what to write to get your pins seen, clicked on, and converting! This is the topic I get the most questions about, and I can’t wait to help you be a Pinterest pro, too!
>> Follow along on Instagram @thesarahburk for more real life updates, cat pics, and whatever fun coffee vessel I’m hyperfixated on at that moment.
