5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Pinterest Growth
If you're fairly new to Pinterest it can be frustrating when you're putting in the work in but not seeing results.
As I've talked about before, Pinterest is an incredibly powerful marketing tool for businesses in many different types of industries - from graphic design to sportwear, and everything in between! But it's going to be the most effective only when you know what you're doing...
Using Pinterest as a business in a marketing capacity is very different to using Pinterest for personal use, which is why a lot of small business owners struggle to get the results they were hoping for in terms of increased account activity, website traffic, and ultimately, business growth!
Below are five tips that can give you a quick and easy win to push your Pinterest marketing strategy in the right direction:
1. Re-write your board titles
When you first set up your boards you may have seen other people using fancy, quirky ways of writing their board titles, such as including swirly characters ({~|) or adding spaces or full stops in between letters (f.o.r e x a m p l e).
This looks cute and fun, but it's important to remember that Pinterest is a search engine. And you need to optimise your profile for Pinterest, like you would your website for Google. One of the ways you can do this is by making sure your board titles include the keywords and phrases that you want to be found for in Pinterest, and that means they need to be 'readable' to Pinterest's algorithm.
2. Make sure you’re using a ‘business’ account
You can easily switch your personal Pinterest account to a business account in the settings, and it gives you a lot of extra features you need to improve your account growth and website traffic.
It allows you to claim your domain so that all pins from your website get attributed back to your Pinterest account, and 'enable rich pins' (as I'll discuss in the next point). It also gives you access to analytics so you can see what's working well on your account and refine your strategy. As well as this it gives you the ability to start to setting up promoted pins if you want to.
3. Enable ‘rich pins’ on your website
What 'rich pins' do is basically pull information about the content you're pinning through to display on Pinterest. It works for articles, recipes, products and apps, but you have to enable your website to give Pinterest this information first.
You can see below the difference between non-rich pins and rich pins:
^ A ‘non’ Rich Pin
^ A Rich Pin
The instructions for enabling rich pins will depend on what platform your website is built on. In Squarespace, all you have to do is add Pinterest to your Connected Accounts (Settings > Connected Accounts > Connect Account) and then authorise Pinterest to connect with Squarespace. Once this is done, head over to Pinterest's 'Rich Pin Validator' and submit a link (any recent article!) and check that it's validated and working.
With WordPress, you'll need to install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin, head to the 'Social' tab for the plugin, and make sure the 'Facebook Opengraph' button is set to 'enable'. Then head over to the 'Rich Pin Validator' to complete the steps.
Once you've done this your pins will be much more eye-catching in Pinterest's feed and give readers a better 'at a glance' view of your content.
4. Add Keywords to your Pin descriptions
When writing your pin descriptions, make sure you are using specific keywords and phrases that relate to your pin and your overall content, and that people would actually be searching for in Pinterest.
To get an idea for what people are actually searching for in Pinterest, simply start typing your keywords into the search bar, and have a look at all the suggested search terms that appear underneath. This can show you what are popular search phrases at the moment.
5. Create multiple pin images/graphics for the same content
The aim of Pinterest is to get your content seen be as many of your target audience as possible, so why not double your chances (or triple them!) by creating multiple pin graphic/image designs for your piece of content (like you’ll see I’ve done at the top of this blog post!).
Sharing different designs means you'll reach more people, but you can also track how well each different design is performing in your analytics, which can give you a good idea of what style of designs you should focus on for your next creations.
Once you're using Pinterest with an intentional strategy and using best practices, you're setting yourself up for better results and a successful marketing avenue for your business. I've personally used Pinterest to grow my blog audience, grow an email list over over 10,000 subscribers, and to consistently get design clients in my business.
Learn how to use Pinterest marketing to generate website traffic in my online course!
✔ Learn how the Pinterest algorithm works so you can set up your profile & Boards for SEO
✔ Prep your ‘Pinterest Funnel’ with content that converts and actually achieves your goals
✔ Start creating engaging, optimised Pins straight away (with time-saving tips & tools to help!)
✔️ Design an ongoing strategy that works for you, requiring less than 1hr a week
^ Do all this in a day with The Pinterest Traffic Playbook!
