Despite Pinterest being one of the greatest sources of traffic for inspired bloggers and infopreneurs, it can get pretty depressing when your pins fail to get any impressions (a.k.a. views).
This can be a common occurrence, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Yet I did know what I was doing and I was still struggling.
Despite once having over 1 million monthly visitors on my Pinterest account a few years ago, I’d since neglected the social media platform and watched my numbers drop all the way back down to zero.
Since then, Pinterest has been gaining in popularity and is now being taken a lot more seriously by online marketers.
Because of that, I’ve had to work harder than ever before to grow my Pinterest account and compete for all that juicy website traffic.
In this post, I will share with you the two main strategies that I’ve recently used to double my impressions literally overnight – going from 2.19k impressions to 4.08k.
(I realise that’s not quite double but it’s near enough!)
#1 // Keyword Optimization
I’ve always made an effort to write detailed descriptions for every single one of my pins.
Hoping that whoever was reading them would get an exact idea of what was behind said pin – and click on it.
However, I deeply underestimated the importance of Pinterest SEO.
For those that don’t know…
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
It’s the process of optimizing your content to get it ranking towards the very top of relevant search results.
The higher you rank, the more impressions you’ll get.
And the more impressions you get, the more clicks you’ll get.
(That’s the theory anyway).
So how do you optimize your content and get more impressions on Pinterest?
You use the right keywords.
The competition on Pinterest has only gotten stronger and stronger, so we need to be more calculated in our approach than maybe we would have been a few years ago.
That’s why it’s essential that you thoroughly research your ideal keywords to ensure that you can make the most of your pins and get more impressions on Pinterest.
Otherwise, you risk spending hours on a pin design (and/or piece of content) which then gets no views or impressions at all.
Luckily for you, there’s an easy way to avoid this…
How to do Pinterest keyword research
(You will need to have a business account on Pinterest to do this)
- Visit ads.pinterest.com (or .co.uk, .pt etc).
- Instead of promoting a pin, you want to Create Campaign.
- It will ask you to choose a campaign objective, name, budget etc. Just hit continue and move to the next step.
- You’ll then need to select a strategy, select Find New Customers and then scroll down to the section called Keywords & Interests.
- In here, it will be defaulted to ‘Add Interests’. Click on Add Keywords and you should see the following screen.
Within this section, you can search for a broad keyword that you would like to rank for and it will suggest popular terms and phrases that people are searching for – in relation to that keyword.
Using this, you can add such terms and phrases into your Pin description to ensure that you can rank for those keywords.
My recommendation would be to choose five relevant keywords and phrases that best match your content.
You will then want to paste said keywords into your pin description.
How to write your Pinterest pin descriptions
Don’t worry if your Pinterest keywords look messy right now, as the main purpose of this is to get your content ranking for the terms and phrases that people are actually searching for.
That’s not to say that we can’t make your pin descriptions look nice though.
Obviously, the easier it is to read – the more likely it is that people will click on your pins.
So, the first step would be to split up your keywords in an organized fashion. I for one like to do so like this…
keyword one // keyword two // keyword three
… and so on.
You can decide how you wish to segment your keywords. In any event, these will be placed at the bottom of your pin descriptions.
They go at the bottom because they likely won’t make much sense to many people.
With that in mind, you’ll want to include an opening paragraph at the top of your pin description.
This paragraph should explain exactly what your link is about, who it’s for and why it’s for them.
NOTE: If you can subtly include any of your researched keywords in this paragraph then that’s really going to help your Pinterest SEO.
Once that’s done, you should have your opening paragraph(s) at the top, followed by your keywords, hopefully with a space in between.
If you want to add an additional section at the end with 2-3 hashtags then feel free to do so.
- Do hashtags work on Pinterest? Check out this article by Louise Myers.
#2 // Alternative Pin Design
The second big change I made which helped to double my impressions on Pinterest was in how I designed my pins.
Although my pins never looked that bad, they were always a bit… safe.
I mean, I adhered to all of the conventional rules that the top content creators (on Pinterest) seemed to follow.
Including everything from the layouts, the fonts, the colours and the photography.
Yet, I never really gained much traction with my pins.
Why?
Because my content looked just like everybody else’s.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist”.
Pablo Picasso
My pins failed to stand out!
(…and were also totally off-brand)
So even if they were ranking at the top of your Pinterest feed, you certainly wouldn’t have noticed them amongst the relentless barrage of flat-lay images and dusty pinks.
And if you didn’t notice them – you definitely didn’t click on them.
That’s why my pin designs had to change.
For ages, I felt like I had to appease the feminine crowd that’s closely associated with Pinterest (and bloggers).
And that if my pin designs catered to this feminine stereotype – I would endure a lot of success.
But I was wrong.
In fact, it was this sudden change to go against the norm that’s helped me to stand out.
My new pin designs were more on-brand, using darker and harsher tones, which has separated me from my closest competitors.
And as a result, gaining me more impressions, pin clicks and traffic from Pinterest.
But it wasn’t as simple as just changing my colour scheme.
Oh no.
This wasn’t just a blanket change across all of my pins, new and old.
The way I design my pins now became calculated.
Again, much like with the Pinterest keywords, I had to do some thorough research beforehand.
If you’re interested, you can check out the following article for more info on…
Conclusion
There were two main reasons why my impressions on Pinterest doubled overnight.
One being keyword research and the other being the way I now design my Pins.
Neither my pin descriptions nor designs were ever that bad before, but in taking the time to do some calculated research, I managed to rank my content towards the top of people’s search results.
Results that people were actually searching for.
Do you have any questions or feedback on this post? Let me know in the comments below.
