The Best Ways to Optimize Your Pinterest Presence
Pinterest has grown from a humble image-sharing site into a full-fledged visual search engine, boasting 175 million monthly users and more than 50 billion posts. But with so much content flooding the platform, your brand might get lost in the mix.
Like any other search engine, in order to reach your target audience, you need to optimize your content. Luckily, optimizing your Pinterest profile, boards, and Pins is pretty simple!
Optimizing Your Pinterest Profile
Your profile is the center of your Pinterest persona. Here, users can see your profile picture, username, bio, and all of your boards.
Make a Business Account. More robust than a personal account, upgrading to a business account will give you access to exclusive tools, like the Showcase feature, a rotating gallery that highlights your top boards. Business accounts are free to create.
Claim Your Website. Visitors want to know they’re looking at your official brand account, not an imposter. Verifying your site also gives you additional perks, such as website analytics and early access tool-testing.
Identify Yourself. Make sure your username makes it clear who you are and that your profile description uses keywords to describe who you are and what you do. URLs in this section won't be clickable, but adding one can sometimes be helpful anyway.
Connect Your Accounts. You can directly share Pins and boards on your other social media feeds by linking other accounts, like Twitter and Facebook, to your Pinterest profile.
Rearrange Your Boards. Put your most popular boards at the top of your page so visitors see your best-performing content first.
Choose Board Covers. Adding a relevant and eye-catching cover to a board makes it easier for people to understand what kind of content they’ll find on it.
Optimizing Pinterest Boards
All Pins get posted to boards, which are basically groups of pins that usually have something in common or fall under a shared category. You can have up to 100 boards per account, and there's no limit to the number of pins per board.
Use Keywords. Although individual pins aren't indexed by search engines, boards are. Many boards get really specific, so using keywords in your board name is an awesome opportunity for your profile to get indexed for that topic. Users can also search for boards matching their search terms, so this will help you attract more pinners to the board.
Keep Descriptions Short and Sweet. Go ahead and add some detail in the board description. Board descriptions can be up to 500 characters, so you have room to write. Don’t forget to use keywords, too.
Choose the Right Category. To help you stay organized, Pinterest provides a drop-down menu of potential board categories to pick from. Always label your board appropriately for maximum optimization.
Don’t Set to Secret. Check if the “Secret” option is toggled on your board. If a board is marked as secret, then only you and users you personally invite will be able to see its contents.
Pin Conservatively. Even though you can pin a thousand images to a board, don’t. Chances are, no one’s going to scroll through them all. Aim for 200 to 300 Pins max, then consider paring down your Pins or moving them elsewhere.
Add Sections. Like a board within a board, a section gives you more space to organize individual pins as you’d like. For instance, pins within a board dedicated to digital advertising could be sorted into sections like search, display, and video.
Optimizing Individual Pins
Now, onto pins, what really make up the Pinterest community! Although they're not indexed by external search engines, Pinterest’s internal search feature obviously pulls from Pin data, so you still want them in tip-top optimized shape.
Optimize File Names. Often overlooked, file names play a large part in search engine indexing. Rename your uploaded files from generic names like “IMG0111” to more descriptive keywords. When pinning images from an external website, use alt text.
Write a Description. Like your boards, keeping your Pin descriptions on the short side is best. After all, most people don’t go to Pinterest to read. In fact, descriptions don’t even appear unless someone actually clicks on your Pin. You only have 500 characters in this space, so make them count.
Use Hashtags. Taking a page from Twitter and Instagram, Pinterest incorporates hashtags within its platform. Users can search or click on a hashtag to bring up relevant Pins. Hashtags are a great addition to your Pin description. Just don’t go overboard on the #’s.
Add Website Links. If you’re linking your Pin to outside content, like a blog post, make sure you put the correct URL in the website field. You don’t want someone clicking the “Visit” button, only to land on the wrong page.
As with any digital marketing endeavor, always make sure to keep an eye on your analytics before, during, and after making any optimization tweaks. Cleaning up your profile, organizing your boards, and filling out the details in your Pins will put you on the path to Pinterest success.
This post originally appeared on eZanga.