I signed up for Pinterest years ago, but I have to admit I never fully understood the purpose of the service at the time. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be my notebook for inspirational design, or a social network, or should I use it to promote Flockler’s latest work and drive traffic to our website.
Until I listened to Amy Porterfield's podcast.
Pinterest is a search engine
According to Pinterest statistics by Omnicore, there are 416 million active users browsing Pinterest each month to discover new ideas, interestingly 71 % of them female. And Pinterest is driving sales too: 90 % of users say they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest. The average Pinterest user types a keyword to search eight times each month.
Do you already have a marketing and SEO strategy for Pinterest?
If you are anything like me, you don’t, and I thought I’d share some of my recent research on Pinterest marketing and SEO strategies to help you get started. Here are five strategies that can help to drive traffic from Pinterest to your website and back:
- Label boards with keywords and optimise for user intent
- Add call to actions to images and optimise for mobile
- Concentrate on growing the number of repins instead of followers
- Pin often
- Embed Pins to your website
1) Label boards with keywords and optimise for user intent
Just like you are optimising your content for Google search results, you should think about user intent on Pinterest too. What are the keywords and phrases that your audience is searching for? What problems are you solving for them?
In addition to other ranking factors such as the content and popularity of the pin, Pinterest displays the search results based on the title and description of boards. Make sure both the board’s title and description have keywords aligned with your overall content and marketing strategy, user intent and your business objectives. Create multiple boards to keep content consistent. When adding new pins, make sure the description is helpful, enticing and motivates the user to take action.
2) Add call to actions to images and optimise for mobile
Want action? Ask for it. Adding a call to action to the image is a great way to grab users' attention. A perfect call to action creates a sense of urgency motivating the user to click (note that promotional content does not work well on Pinterest, though). Use large fonts and an image ratio of 2:3 – vertical images take more space especially on mobile.
For more inspiration, check Canva’s blog post on creating call to actions for social media.
3) Concentrate on growing the number of repins instead of followers
Pinterest’s strategy has been to become a visual search engine where posting high-quality, relevant and engaging content is more important than building a network and increasing the number of followers. To get more visibility in Pinterest's search results, you’ll need to find ways to encourage others to repin your content. Instead of news and promotions, share content that is inspirational, helpful and, for example, shows how customers are using your product and services. If you have built an active customer community on other social channels, you should have some user-generated content to repurpose here too.
Another way to increase the number of repins is to collaborate with others and create a group board. Do some research to find the Pinterest influencers on your topic and partner with those who are actively contributing new engaging content and have already built an audience. Combined, you’ll have a lot more followers and higher reach of content which should help you to grow the number of repins.
4) Pin often
Based on the Pinterest data by Buffer, it’s recommended to post at least five times a day to get optimal results. It may sound like a high number, but remember that not all the content need to be yours. Curating and repinning popular content from others builds engagement, and even the repins of your repinned content improve your Pinterest search ranking. Also, you can pin the same content to multiple boards – using social media management tools to space out them throughout the day.
5) Embed Pins to your website
Last but not least, using social media aggregators like Flockler, embed Pinterest boards (plus all other social media feeds) to your website and other digital services to increase the dwell time, make your site look vibrant and to increase the number of repins. With Flockler you'll be able to embed and display an automated feed of pins from your account or the specific board on websites, mobile app, digital screens, and more.
