7 Ways to Optimise Your Pinterest Account for SEO
September 2nd 2013 | By Steve Grant
In recent years, Pinterest has become one of the fastest growing social networks. Not only is it a major source of referring traffic for many business websites, but users of Pinterest also have huge purchasing power. Pinterest users spend more money, purchase more frequently and in greater quantities than any other social network.
Trialling Pinterest for your business is definitely worthwhile. If it proves successful, the next stage is to optimise the account so that it can be easily found within search engines. Here are 7 tips for doing just that:
1. Optimising a Business Username
A Pinterest business account has no character limit for the company name, but the username is confined to 15 characters. If your full company name doesn’t fit, you need to choose something that’s memorable, summarises what your business does, is easy to spell and focuses on keywords.
2. Make Use of the “About” Section
The Pinterest ‘About’ section allows for 200 characters so this space should be used smartly. Not only does this section need to be succinct and specific, it should be keyword rich relating to who your business is and what you do.
3. Include Links to Your Website
When you pin or re-pin a post that features your products, be sure to include a full link as well as editing the description. This will not only associate the images to your brand, but will open up the opportunity to purchase if you have an e-commerce site, or to learn more about your services.
4. Make Your Pinboards Specific
Pinterest offers some generic pinboards to get users thinking about how to organise their pins. For example, ‘For the Home’. In order to get your business noticed within Pinterest, your pinboards should be more specific to your product or service offering, keyword rich and aligned with what end-users are looking for. So for example, if you are a home retailer, you could replace ‘For the Home’” with ‘Stylish Bedrooms’.
5. Think About Your Customers
Think about your customers, their buying habits and lifestyles and then build your pinning strategy around their interests, familiar terminology and possible search terms. For example for an estate agent, Pinterest is a good way to pin images or videos relating to tips about buying a home, but it’s also a good way to show knowledge of the local community. Boards could be used to feature schools, shops, restaurants and other local amenities that house hunters may be looking for.
6. Make Good Use of Pin Descriptions and Images
Each individual pin has the capacity for a 500 character word description and is the biggest opportunity for text based content. These should be used wisely to ensure each pin contains terms users can relate to, has keyword rich content and reliable links. Images should be sized correctly to Pinterest’s specifications and should be uploaded with a suitably named file and not just the default name. If an image is being taken from the business website, it should have an alt tag associated with it.
7. Utilise Long Tail Descriptions
Using long tail descriptions for your pins can boost find-ability. For example, food and drink represent a large percentage of what people pin, so using a short description about ‘red wine’ is not going to stand out. Instead, descriptions need to be more granular and you need to be more creative in what your customers might be pinning.
A good way to do this is to give people creative ways that they can use your product or services. For example, a wine producer may talk about how to creatively use empty wine bottles or wine corks. This will help improve SEO, provide followers with more context around the usage of your product or service and attract more of a community.
Using Pinterest for business can have some huge benefits and so optimising your account for SEO purposes is essential if you want to cut through the noise and let your business be found. Contact us if you need any help with search engine optimisation and Pinterest.