Why It’s Important
Why be on Pinterest at all? The short answer is, you want referral traffic, and Pinterest is basically built for just that. It’s sold to us as a place to get ideas and inspiration – which it is – but you’re a business person. You know what it really is. It’s a collection of ads.
At least that’s how you should see it for your purposes. You are posting little graphic ads for people to click on so they come to your content, which is more often than not a post on your website.
Think about what you want as a user when you use Pinterest. You want to be presented with choices that appeal to you. When you click on them, you want to be taken immediately to the content they promise without all kinds of other junk getting in the way.
Don’t do this
If you’ve been a user of Pinterest for any time you have clicked on things only to be presented with a bunch of ads and pop-ups. Sometimes there’s so much junk that you can’t see any of the content you were promised. or so many ads pop up as you’re reading that they push your content up or down the screen and you have to scroll to find where you were – only for it to happen again
Or there will be a video that doesn’t fit on your phone’s screen. Or it will send you to a website’s home page that barely hints at the content you were looking for. Don’t be that kind of content creator.
Do this instead
As a smart business person. what you want to do for your viewers then is make sure none of that happens to them. Do everything you can to make the experience pleasant and useful to them. You want them to have the optimal experience every time they click one of your links.
And for them to have that optimal experience, you need to optimize your website. Well actually, there are three parts to that.
- Optimize your Pinterest setting.
- Optimize your posts(s)
- Optimize your website
So let’s take them one at a time.
Optimizing Pinterest
I have a whole separate article on setting up your Pinterest account that gets more into the nitty-gritty of steps to take when first starting a new account. So I’m just going to skim over the basics pretty quickly here.
When people use Pinterest, they will find your pins in one of 4 ways:
- It will be presented to them on their home feed because they’ve shown an interest in such things in the past
- Their specific search results will show them your pin(s)
- They will search broad categories that could also result in your profile or pins coming up
- They will look for – or be directed to – one of your themed boards
So how do you optimize for them? It comes down to two things: Keywords and quality.
Keywords
If you don’t have a keyword list, make one. And use it constantly.
- Use those keywords in your pins in various ways (more on that later).
- Use Keywords in your display name and profile settings
- Use them in names and content of boards – and board sections.
Quality
Quality is the second half of the equation. Don’t just stuff keywords anywhere. If you use a keyword, make sure the pin (or board or profile) is providing valuable content for that word.
Pinterest wants to keep users coming back and staying on PInterest. If you can help them do that, they will reward you with more traffic. How do they know you’re doing that? Users will tell them by saving, sharing and clicking through on your pins.
How to you get users to do that? It isn’t a huge secret, and it’s not some clever trick. Just provide them with good content and make it as easy as possible for them to use, save, and share your content. Which as good a segue as you can get to the next section:
Optimizing Posts
What we’re talking about here is optimizing the specific content to which you are linking from your pin. That content could be a YouTube video, a product for sale, an image on another platform, affiliate links, TikTok videos, or written content on your site.
But I refer only to posts in this section heading. Why? Because all those other things are a departure from what most people expect and want when they click a link. I mean, videos done right are okay too, but in general a blog post that includes that video is usually a better option – in my opinion anyway.
(Product pins that allow you to shop and purchase directly from Pinterest are another thing. They are relatively new and merit their own article)
I choose the word post because that what most content on WordPress is, and WordPress is the go-to platform for creating content on the web. Some of your content will be pages rather than posts. That’s fine. Same difference for the most part when it comes to promoting them
Optimizing posts for Pinterest can be boiled down to three things:
- Deliver relevant content
- Have great images for pins
- Make it easy for your reader
Deliver relevant and appealing content
When a person clicks through to your post, they should immediately know that they are at the right place. That means a clear post title that relates directly to the pin they clicked on. The look and feel should be similar to the pin that sent them there.
It means they shouldn’t be faced immediately with an ad, or an opt-in form, or any other pop-ups. There should be no super fancy navigation options. They should be able to scroll along and get the content they were looking for.
The thing that makes that possible is having your keyword research done. Frankly, the content you write should come from those keywords. The pin should come after the post is written, and it should target the same keywords. If you do that, the pin and post will match the reader’s expectations.
It may be a post rich in images. That’s fine, and it is often what people are looking for along with the text that supports and explains the images. Actually, that brings us to thing number 2
Have great images for pins
Don’t worry. You don’t need to be a professional photographer, nor do you need to hire one.
I’m talking about having images optimized to be Pinterest pins, regardless of where you get them. These images will be more than just a static picture of something anyway. There’s more to it than I can go over here, but I’ll try to hit some of the highlights:
Make images vertical. People are using their phones for this. They should be higher than they are wide. The rule of thumb is that 1000 pixels wide by 1500 pixels high is the best.
Place them where they make sense to the reader. Don’t get tricky trying to optimize for Pinterest (or SEO) at the expense of user experience. Some pictures are good for clarifying your content. Some is good for using as a pinnable image. Keep them separate and in their proper places unless they can really serve both functions well. There are ways to have beautiful pins that don’t show up visually on your post at all too.
That same advice goes for all of the text related to your pin: Title, caption, filename, alt text, description. Make it all pertinent to your content and keyword rich.
- Special note on alt text: It is there to let search engines know what the picture is, and for users who – for whatever reason – cannot view the image, to know what it is. Use that text to accurately do that. Including keywords is recommended if it still accurately describes the picture. DO NOT use it as a place for stuffing keywords or writing a Pinterest optimized description as some other ‘experts’ tell you. There are more legit ways to do that, and using the alt text for that purpose is counterproductive.
There are ways that you can (should) add a Pinterest description directly on your site for images. You can either use a plug in or do it manually with a special HTML tag for that purpose. Don’t try to shoehorn things like that where they don’t belong.
Brand your images. When your pin comes up in a a big sea of others it should stand out in two ways. The first is that people who are familiar with your brand should recognize it immediately. What that generally means is having a consistent layout of he various elements. Be consistent with the colors your use. And be consistent with your font selection.
The other way it should stand out is the colors used. Look at search results for the keywords you’re targeting. Are they all Shades of yellow? make yours blue or purple to stand out. Are they all reds? Try yellow and green. What if they’re all rainbows and glitter? Try a bold black and white, or maybe the bright colors on a black background. Something to draw their eye to your pin.
I know this conflicts with the last point. It’s a delicate art, but you can retain your brand and change colors up too. If you have selected two or three colors as your signature colors, you can switch up which one is dominant in any given pin – whether it is in font color, background, image color palette, or borders.
But if you have to choose between optimal color or brand consistency, go for the latter.
Optimizing Your Website
In addition to optimizing your individual posts and images, you should be optimizing your website overall. A lot of what makes your site optimal for Pinterest is the same as what optimizes it for google and other platforms and search engines.
Speed
The speed at which your content loads for the user. Remember, they may be on their phone in a building with limited signal or wifi. There’s only so much you can control, but you should control what you can.
Now, there are tons of people online who can tell tell you dozens of ways on speeding up your website. The majority of it is legit, but there is some low-hanging fruit that will give you the most bang for your buck.
- Good hosting – I use SiteGround and recommend it. It’s not the absolute fastest, but it always beats BlueHost, HostGator and GoDaddy according to every side-by-side test I’ve ever seen. I like them for other reasons too. Hostinger gets good marks, but I have no experience with them.
- Lightweight themes – It’s hard to know which are lightweight, but my rule of thumb is fewer features=lighter weight. Not very scientific I admit. For that, I defer to this: https://athemes.com/collections/best-free-lightweight-wordpress-themes/
- Get rid of unused plug-ins and themes – If you’ve tried different themes and plug-ins but decided you don’t want them, Un-install them from your site. Even if they are not being used they add baggage to your site that could be slowing it down.
- Optimize images – That means starting with smaller file sizes to begin with. It also means using a plug-in that will reduce the file sizes of your existing images and deliver them more efficiently to the user. Also, most WordPress installations and themes include Lazy Load as part of it. What this does is load only the images that the user would see. It holds off on the others until they scroll down. Keep your WordPress and themes up to date and look around the settings for that option. It should be activated by default.
- Don’t host videos – There’s essentially no reason to do so in this day and age. Vimeo and YouTube both offer free video hosting. You embed a bit of code on your post and the video shows up there. Your audience won’t notice any difference. Each hosting platforms has options for showing/hiding certain features. That’s a topic for another time.
- Break big posts into little ones – If you’re doing all text, it’s no biggie. But if you have a lot of other more resource intensive content, a very large post can be broken up into smaller posts that link together – using a clickable table of contents or just strategically placed links between them.
User experience
The user experience starts the microsecond they click that pin. In addition to content loading quickly, it should have the following characteristics.
When a user clicks your link from Pinterest to your site, they should be greeted with the information they are looking for in an appealing fashion with little more added.
I’ve mentioned this before. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when that is not what I get when clicking to a site. I hate going to a site and seeing a ton of ads and pop-ups. Or a header image that stays on the screen as I scroll, blocking the content I want to read. Or someone asking me to sign up for their newsletter or special offer before I get a chance to read anything.
In short, it should be uncluttered and well organized. Which brings us to the next topic.
Navigation
Also, when your guest is done reading, they may want to delve further into your sites content. Having a very simple navigation system is key. Options vary by theme, but in general there is the option for a drop-down menu. I feel that the drop-down should have 3 or MAYBE 4 options at most.
Keep it simple. The options should take them to either a new piece of content or a directory of other content that fits the description of the menu item they just clicked.
The “Housekeeping” links should be unobtrusively at the bottom of the page in the footer. Things like policies, copyright notices, affiliate disclaimers and such.
There is a time when you would not necessarily want any navigation. If they followed a link that indicated that they’d be presented with an offer or sign-up form, then you would want to hide the navigation options. They are there for one purpose: to sign up or buy. Usually traffic to those pages comes from either an internal lick from your site, or from a paid ad.
Tracking
This final web optimization component isn’t something that the user will see, but it will provide you with valuable insight.
You can get a lot of information from Google Analytics and also from Pinterest about cutomer bahavior on your site. They both allow you to track campaigns and see what content and strategies are performing best.
There is a lot of overlap in the content they provide, but each has it’s unique benefits. For that reason I suggest using them both.
In both cases, it involves including a unique tracking code in your site. Both have very good tutorials on how to do that, so I’m not going to go into it here.
One last thing
Optimizing your site for Pinterest is a two-way street. You want visitors from Pinterest to have a good experience, but you also visitors from other sources to have a good experience as well
And when they do, you want them to share that content with others. That means you should ask them to Pin your content. And you should make it as simple for them as possible.
That means using themes and plugins that do that for you.
I usually opt for free versions of things, but in this instance I am recommending TastyPins as an add-on. It makes a lot of the stuff mentioned in this post easier. It is a relatively low cost plugin and you only pay once (no recurring subscription fee).