When you optimize your blog to be Pinterest-friendly, apply a few simple SEO hacks to your Pinterest business account, and promote your profile to your readers, you give your high-quality content its best shot at flourishing on the visual search engine.
With over 400 million users coming to Pinterest every month to search for and save ideas and inspiration, you’re making an excellent investment in your blog’s future. It’s no surprise that you’re looking to drive a piece of the action back to your blog.
Whether you already have an active Pinterest business account or are just starting the process of claiming your website, you can easily come out of the gate swinging if you implement any (ideally, all!) of the following 12 ways to promote your Pinterest presence, optimize your blog so it’s Pinterest-friendly, and use simple Pinterest SEO hacks to enhance your visibility on the platform.
Let your followers know you’re on Pinterest
This is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many bloggers neglect to mention to their readers that they’re on Pinterest.
Here are three places that you can promote your Pinterest account to your target audience to convert them into Pinterest followers.
Facebook post
If you have a following on a Facebook page or group, let them know that they can now find you on Pinterest by mentioning it in a Facebook post. This is so easy to do and requires less than 5 minutes from start to finish!
Check out the awesome comments on my client, Practical Self Reliance’s Facebook post when I let her followers know she’s on Pinterest:
How cool is that?
Notice how a commenter said they found her first on Pinterest before becoming a Facebook follower?
If you have a lot of blog posts, Pinterest is the perfect way for your Facebook friends to save and organize your posts for future use! And chances are, they’ll express their gratitude for letting them know you’re on Pinterest.
Instagram story
If you’re promoting your blog on Instagram, try creating an Instagram story showing off one of your Pinterest boards and a CTA for them to follow you there for more inspiration.
One way I like to do this is by mentioning, for example, a post about DIY crafting followed by a video screen capture of pinning a pin image from my DIY crafting post to my DIY crafting Pinterest board.
By doing this, you demonstrate visually how easy it is to repin your blog post. In the last frame of the story, I’ll place a simple CTA to check out a board or to follow me on Pinterest.
If you’re wondering how to do a screen capture, most phones these days have them built-in, but if it’s not, there are plenty to choose from in the Android or iPhone app stores.
Blog post
Promoting your Pinterest account in your blog posts is another wonderful way to let your readers know you’re on Pinterest and how to follow you there.
Embed a Pinterest board
Pinterest has an awesome tool, Pinterest Widget Builder, that allows you to embed all kinds of content — a specific board, Pinterest profile, a pin-worthy image, or buttons to follow or save.
Simply insert your blog post’s URL when prompted and the Pinterest tool will create code for your customized widget. Paste the code into your post where you’d like to display it and boom, you have a fancy call-to-action for your readers to clickthrough.
Embed your Pinterest profile
I love embedding my Pinterest profile at the end of a post. It’s a great way to remind my readers that I’m on the platform and that they can follow me there.
If you aren’t using a single Pinterest-friendly social share plugin on your blog, you’re leaving money on the table. Get with it!
You can find tons of different options when it comes to Pinterest-friendly social plugins and a lot of them work seamlessly for WordPress blogs.
There are a lot of great Pinterest marketing tools for bloggers and the two you’ll find below rank among the best.
MiloTree is one of the most user and WordPress-friendly social follow plugins available. Whether you’re using it to promote your Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, Shopify, Email list, etc. the MiloTree plugin does it all with ease.
The Grow by Mediavine social share plugin is my absolute favorite way to have my readers share my blog posts. You can customize its colors and social icons to reflect the aesthetic of your blog, as well as placement within the post itself.
Best of all, you can hide Pinterest pins within the plugin so that when a reader pins your blog post, they’ll have the opportunity to select whichever pin-worthy image they desire.
Create Pinterest idea pins
Idea pins! Everyone loves to hate on Pinterest idea pins, but I’ll tell you what, they work and can even go viral!
If you’re not creating Pinterest idea pins, what are you waiting for? Listen. I know, they don’t have links and while that’s definitely a huge disadvantage, it’s not the end of the world. In fact, idea pins are a great way to create brand awareness and gather followers.
What’s more, you can now tag products or affiliate links in your idea pins.
Not convinced? Check out the stats a client of mine received on one idea pin that I made only two weeks ago! Pretty impressive, huh?
Create tasteful new pins for your old blog posts
In 2020, Pinterest came out and confirmed what many of us had already guessed: only new URLs would be considered fresh pins from here on out. I wrote at length about this in my blog post, 3 essential levels of pin freshness, and in the comic below of what this news doesn’t mean.
It is still perfectly acceptable to create eye-catching new pins for your old content as long as you do it tastefully. What that means is, you need to create pins that are drastically different from pins leading to the same URL. The days of only changing the colors of your text overlay and calling it a new pin are behind us.
We now need to get creative in our pin design. Give each pin a different keyword-rich title text, new overlay design, and color scheme. Make it stand out from the surrounding pins in the Pinterest user’s home feed when they’re searching for your idea. Do everything you can, just don’t let it be spammy.
I personally am a huge fan of using Canva for pin design and recommend them to anyone with or without design skills. If graphic design is not something you have an eye for, Creative Market has many Pinterest pin templates to choose from.
Optimize your Pinterest pins, profile, and boards
Pinterest SEO is akin to Google SEO in that keyword research is important.
All aspects of your account should be optimized and laced with keywords: pin titles, pin, and board descriptions, pin images, you name it!
Sure, you could slap together whatever you want, pin it to Pinterest, and hope for the best.
I personally would rather save myself the frustration and give my blog the best chance of being successful on the platform by optimizing it from the get-go.
If the latter sounds like the route you’d like to take your Pinterest account, smart choice! You have a few options to optimize your account:
Get your Pinterest account audited by a pro — I offer this service and it’s one of my best sellers (it’s also included for free in my Pinterest monthly management plans)
Or grab my Pinterest Clean Up cheatsheet using the form below. This is an excellent option if you’d like to audit your Pinterest account yourself.
If you decide to go the DIY route, you’ll need to learn how to properly use Pinterest SEO to optimize your content for search.
Pin Inspector is a new software for Pinterest keyword research that helps you discover top-performing keywords in your niche using six data extraction tools and is one Pinterest marketing tool I highly recommend checking out if you’re planning on doing your own keyword research.
This was a helpful blog post for Pinterest to learn about.
Pinterst SEO optimization makes your profile ready to be served in a best way to your audience. And creating relevant Pinterest boards helps to find all the related pins at a place. Also being the most search engine Pinterest really does help in growing your business.