“Why did my Pinterest traffic drop and how do I fix it?”
When Pinterest traffic to your website drops, it can be frustrating and time-consuming trying to figure out what the cause may be. With so many variables, it’s hard to know where to even begin searching for what you’re doing wrong. I put together this guide that seeks to cover 15 reasons why your Pinterest traffic may have dropped and how to go about fixing it.
15 reasons why your Pinterest traffic dropped & how to fit it
A drop in Pinterest traffic is cause for alarm and an indication that somethings off. When clicks decline lower and lower, the feeling of helplessness rings a bell.
You could be doing a number of things (or nothing at all!) wrong and still not know where to begin your search for the root cause of your loss of Pinterest traffic.
Let’s take a look at 15 variables that could be causing you to lose Pinterest traffic and how to fix each of them!
Pinning inconsistently
When you’re super busy, it can be hard to find the time to manage your Pinterest account yourself. If you’re pinning inconsistently whenever you remember to do it, you’re not going to see steady Pinterest traffic to your website.
How to fix it:
Use a scheduler like Tailwind to bulk schedule all of your pins at the start of each month. Depending on how many pins you’re scheduling per day (no more than 30), it can take a while. If that’s not something you want to bother doing yourself, you can always hire a Pinterest manager to do it for you.
Pinning to irrelevant boards
A while back, Pinterest made it clear that we should be pinning our pin-worthy images to their most relevant board the first time they’re pinned.
How to fix it:
If you’re pinning to your “best of” board or another irrelevant board, stop right now! Start pinning to your most relevant board first and if you don’t have any that your pin fits into, create a few more. Pinning to relevant boards helps Pinterest know how to categorize your pin in their algorithm.
Pinning to group boards
While group boards used to reign supreme and drive tons of Pinterest traffic to your website, they are officially on the outs. Womp, womp. In fact, Pinterest may even down-rank pins that are pinned to group boards in the future.
How to fix it:
Start the mass exodus of group boards! However, if you have group boards that still perform well for you, keep them, but limit how often you’re pinning to each of them. Tailwind’s convenient pin inspector tool allows you to easily analyze your group boards specifically.
Poor quality content
How much time and effort are you putting into your content or products? If you’re cranking several blog posts or items a week that don’t offer to solve your audience’s problem, have spelling and grammatical errors, and aren’t SEO’d properly, you’re bound to run into drops in Pinterest traffic. The same goes for your images!
How to fix it:
Remember, quality over quantity! Make sure you’re SEO’ing your content and include high-quality images that help your customer or reader understand how to use your product or make your recipe.
If you have so much on your plate that you no longer have the time to create high-quality content, consider delegating a few tasks to a Pinterest professional that specializes in what you need to be done. Chances are, a Pinterest expert can even improve your Pinterest traffic by 4,000% as I did for one blogger.
Poor Pinterest keyword research
You probably know how to do keyword research for Google SEO, but did you know your Pinterest SEO is important too?
How to fix it:
Before you write a blog post or create a product, it’s important to know if your target audience is even looking for what it is your selling or the problem you’re solving for them. To find keywords, search Pinterest for your idea and note the key terms that show up in the drop-down menu of the search bar. Those are the terms that Pinterest users are searching for:
Poor Pinterest title & descriptions
Like I mentioned above, Pinterest SEO is important! And not just for deciding on what your content should be about, but also for your Pinterest titles and descriptions.
In addition, quality pin titles and descriptions should be essential to your Pinterest marketing strategy.
How to fix it:
Write titles and descriptions without “keyword stuffing”. Basically, don’t sound like a computer by stuffing as many keywords as you possibly can into each of your pin’s descriptions. Sound human, capeesh?
If you decide you’d rather have someone clean-up your Pinterest business account, please reach out! I would be more than happy to provide you with a report outlining suggested changes and how to implement them yourself.
Poor Pinterest board descriptions
Not only are the titles of your personal boards important, but so are their descriptions as they further deepen Pinterest’s algorithm’s understanding of what your pins are about.
How to fix it:
Go through all your personal boards and make sure each has an SEO’d description. Use this area to showcase a wide variety of keywords that are relevant to your board’s title.
Poor pin design
Poor pin design might just be the most common contributing factor in the loss of Pinterest traffic. If you’re not creating beautiful images worthy of Pinterest, you’re leaving money on the table! Poorly designed pins don’t go viral on Pinterest.
How to fix it:
Either hire a designer that specializes in pin design or get to work creating your own pinnable images. I personally love using the Canva design platform to create pins!
Canva even has a wide selection of premade Pinterest templates for you to use. With a few tips, tricks, and Canva shortcuts, you can easily make pin-worthy images in no time at all!
Not following Pinterest best practices
This one should come as a no-brainer! If you’re not following Pinterest’s creative best practices, don’t be surprised that your Pinterest traffic is plummeting.
How to fix it:
Be sure you’re complying with everything listed in the platform’s best practices!
Not creating fresh pins
Pinterest has very recently changed its definition of what a fresh pin is. A fresh pin is a pin leading to a brand new, never before seen by Pinterest, URL. Yep, it’s true.
Which makes creating new, high-quality content frequently to maximize clicks to our websites. Pinterest says time and time again that new content receives more exposure than old, recycled content and it appears they’re finally showing us that they mean it.
How to fix it:
Try to improve how quickly you’re creating content and consistently pinning it each week. If that seems impossible right now, consider offloading some of your weekly tasks to a Pinterest marketing professional so you can get back to the creative side of your business!
Apply to work together here! ?
Not creating diverse types of pins
Pinterest video and story pins are hot right now! What’s more, the platform is prioritizing animated pins in their algorithm, making them more likely to reach a wider audience.
Creating a Pinterest marketing strategy with diverse content is becoming more and more essential every day and it’s a great way to drive more Pinterest traffic back to your website.
How to fix it:
Start creating a wide variety of pin types including video and story pins. This is another opportunity to use the awesome tools over on Canva.
Not only do they have plenty of free stock photos included in their Pro membership, but tons of videos for you to use. You can even simply animate some of your normal pins with a click of a button!
Not using Tailwind for scheduling
You may be wondering how not using the Tailwind scheduler could cause your Pinterest traffic to drop. Let me first say that it’s not an issue of manual pinning versus scheduling with a third-party scheduler.
Pinterest and Tailwind are BFF and work together to make Pinterest a happy place for creators to thrive on. They’re not out to get you or punish you for using Tailwind to schedule your pins.
What I’m getting at is, by not using Tailwind and opting to manually pin instead, you’re blindly pinning at random times and most likely, inconsistently (it’s also a ton of work to track your pins!).
How to fix it:
Start using Tailwind! Within your Tailwind dashboard, you can set up their helpful SmartSchedule feature that creates a custom pinning schedule optimized for the times in which your target audience is most engaged.
Not creating new pins for old content
By now, you probably have heard everyone talking about creating new pins! If you’re one of those people out there that haven’t changed your pinning strategy in the last two years, not making new and thoughtful pin ideas is most likely the root cause of your Pinterest traffic decrease.
New pins are any new pin image that has never been seen by Pinterest, while fresh pins are new URLs that haven’t been seen by the platform.
You can create a few new pins all leading back to the same URL, but the catch is, they need to have a different text overlay and image. Basically, you want your pins to look and feel differently to Pinterest users so that you don’t get blocked as spam.
Is just changing the description of your pin and not the text overlay and image enough for it to count as a new pin? NO!
How to fix it:
Start creating a few mew pins for one piece of content using different images and text overlays. I try to switch up the text on my pins too.
For example, this post is called, “Why Did My Pinterest Traffic Drop & How Do I Fix It?”. If I’m making pins, I may change some of my pin’s text to say, “15 Reasons Your Pinterest Traffic Dropped” or something to that effect.
For the pin itself, I may create two new pins using my branding fonts and colors and some that are completely different looking. That way, they speak to a wider audience.
Pinterest algorithm changes
Pinterest is constantly changing its algorithm to improve the user experience. During and after every update they make, there’s a time of flux where no matter what your pinning strategy is, you still may be seeing decreases in Pinterest traffic to your website.
How to fix it:
This one is tricky as there is no precise formula to fix something we don’t have enough information about. Unfortunately, the best thing you can do is stay up to date with changes to the platform’s algorithm through the Pinterest Engineering Blog or in a number of Pinterest-related Facebook groups.
Not pinning during the right season
If you don’t start pinning your Christmas pins until November, you’re too late. Pinterest users are those of us who plan ahead and like to get a jumpstart on our holiday gift ideas and festive food recipes long before the start of the holiday season.
The same goes for other niche topics like gardening, for instance. In early winter, Pinterest users begin searching for spring garden ideas.
How to fix it:
Start scheduling your pins using a strategy with seasonal content in mind! Pinterest Trends is a great way to explore when keywords are most popular.
Another option is to dig into your Google Analytics and note when your seasonal content was on the rise in previous years.
What if your Pinterest traffic continues to drop?
If you’ve analyzed your Pinterest account and are doing everything on this list correctly, you should create an account in the Pinterest Business Community to see if a member of Pinterest’s staff can help you troubleshoot your account.
Luckily, for Tailwind users, there are two awesome features built-in called, SmartGuide and Spam SafeGuard. Together, these features work together to optimize your Pinterest account and prevent you from doing any kind of spammy behavior!
Also, if you’re only analyzing the numbers in Pinterest Analytics, there’s a chance that your Pinterest traffic isn’t actually down at all. Learn how to use Google Analytics for Pinterest to get a clear, accurate, and reliable glimpse at your Pinterest traffic. Check out my favorite Pinterest marketing tools for bloggers to learn about the best tool for analytics and so much more!
If you’ve made changes to your Pinterest account based on the 15 causes of loss of Pinterest traffic that I’ve listed above and aren’t seeing any positive results yet, be patient.
It can take months for changes to impact your Pinterest traffic in a positive way!
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