Preparing Your Website for Pinterest Marketing (+ the traffic that comes with it!)
Pinterest is my favourite traffic generating platform to use for marketing my online business.
It’s one of the best ways to get new audiences and customers over to your website, through sharing pins and images that link back to your site.
But once you’ve started growing on Pinterest and having people click on your pins, you want to make sure your website is READY and prepared for this new traffic, so that you’re making the most of all this new potential.
In this blog post I’m sharing all the steps I’d recommend to prepare your website so you can start taking advantage of your new Pinterest traffic.
PS. Want to learn how to start generating new traffic to your website from Pinterest? Check out my online course, The Pinterest Traffic Playbook!
Table of Contents
1. Make sure your website is clear & easy to navigate around
Chances are, a lot of the new traffic you get from Pinterest will be people who may not have come across you and your business before, so you want to give them the best first impression!
Ensure your website is designed and laid out in a clear way, where it’s easy for people to instantly understand what you do, what you offer, and make it easy for them to get around to the information they need by putting your most important pages in your main navigation menu area, and linking internally to other pages within your content.
2. Double check your links are working on your website!
There’s nothing worse than landing on a web page or blog post and clicking to learn more about a product or service from within the text, and the link doesn’t work! Either it leads to the wrong page, or perhaps an error ‘404’ page.
This happens very often, especially if you have changed your brand name or domain, or have deleted old pages, or updated existing ones with new titles or URLs.
The easiest way to fix this is to use a free broken link checker, and either fix the links or set up 301 redirects to the closest relevant pages to help people find what they’re looking for.
3. Direct your audience around using ‘CTAs’
The likelihood is that once you get traffic from Pinterest onto your website, you want them to look at your content and then take a next step or action - such as signing up to your email list, getting in contact with you, or purchasing a product.
But it’s not always obvious what the next step should be when someone is reading a page (eg. a blog post, or about page), so you need to direct them and make the path clear by calling them to action. This is what ‘CTA’ stands for - call to action.
This could be a in the form of a newsletter sign up form, a product block or link, or a button telling them to click to take a next step.
4. Make your shopping/checkout/enquiry process smooth and streamlined
On a similar note, when the goal of your website is to get your audience to purchase a product, or fill out your enquiry form, you want to make this process as EASY as possible.
Reduce the steps it takes for someone to go from reading a blog post to buying a product by embedding a ‘buy now’ button right into the blog post itself, for example (rather than them clicking a link to your shop page, and then a product page etc). You could just take them straight to the checkout!
Or make your contact form super easy and quick to fill out by reducing the number of questions, or by letting people book a call with you directly on your website using a calendar appointment booking software embedded on the page (eg. TidyCal is a great example of this!*).
5. Design your website with branding consistent with your Pinterest
When you create pins and graphics to share on Pinterest, make sure they are designed to be consistent with the branding (colours, fonts etc) that you have on your website.
This helps Pinterest users to know they are definitely in the right place once they click through a pin to your website; otherwise if they’re totally different they may think the link has broken/gone to the wrong site/is a spam link!
You definitely don’t want your new audience to think this, or they may just leave your website straight away.
6. Ensure your website is quick to load
Did you know that 40% of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds for a website to load before abandoning it and leaving?
That means your website needs to be super quick to load, otherwise people get bored and leave straight away (which means all your efforts in Pinterest marketing will have been for nothing!).
One of the key culprits of this is uploading huge image files to your website, without compressing them first. When the files are big, they load slowly, causing your website to load slowly too.
Ideally any images and graphics you upload to your website should be below 1MB (1000kb) in file size, or even better if you can get them under 500kb. I have a blog post about how to speed up your website here with more tips too!
Other preparation tips (Pinterest website verification, enabling ‘rich pins’ etc)…
There are a few other important things you’ll want to set up on your website to help your pins & images be attributed to your website when they are shared on Pinterest, and to make them more appealing for people to click on when they’re browsing the platform, but I cover all of this inside my course - The Pinterest Traffic Playbook - if you need help!
The Pinterest Traffic Playbook
In this online course you will:
✔ 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!
*Indicates an affiliate link where I get a small commission if you pay for this tool. I only recommend products & tools that I personally use and love, though!
