Pinterest Marketing: A Small Business and Bloggers Guide to Increase Your Traffic

Using Pinterest to Grow Your Business and Blog

If there’s anything constant in this world, it’s the understanding that Pinterest is always changing.

They’re always adding new features or removing the outdated ones from the program. They’re making changes to that algorithm thing that determines how your content gets found.

As Pinterest continues to evolve, it’s important to make changes to your pinning strategy to ensure that you continue to work smarter with Pinterest to use this site to its full potential.

Before we get into the specific steps you should be doing to help your grow your website traffic with Pinterest, let’s work through the reasons WHY you’re using this visual search site.

What are your goals for using Pinterest for your business or blog? Which one of these statements best describes you:

• I want to increase my site traffic to my blog or my sales/product pages.
• My goal is to increase the exposure of my company’s name so more people know about my products/services.
• Site traffic is cool but I really want to grow my sales income.
• I need to connect with qualified customers and get them on my email list.

Your goals may fit into anyone of these statements. Or you may find yourself nodding in agreement to all of them on this list.

Where ever you are with these options, it’s important to know your end game for using Pinterest. What you’re hoping to accomplish will shape the content you create and the pins that you share on the site.

Think about your goals for spending your valuable time pinning. This will steer your path as we continue to work on developing your Pinterest marketing plan.

 

Understanding How SEO Works on Pinterest

Most people think that the first step to understanding how to optimize their content on Pinterest is to run a keyword search on the Pinterest Guided Search { the search bar at the top of the site } but that’s really your second step.

The first thing you need to do is ask yourself these basic questions:

• What are my customers struggling with?
• What problems are my readers dealing with in their lives?

Your answers will help you to understand how your content, products or services is the solution to their problems. How do you help them make their lives easier, do something quicker or save them money?

Take a few minutes to write up your responses to how you’re helping your customers with their struggles.

And then look at the words you used in your answers. THESE are the words that you want to use for your keyword searches. THESE are the phrases your customers are actively using to run their searches in Pinterest.

Take a look at these examples:

1. I need more time in my day — they’re searching for “how to get more done in less time.”
2. How can I create more income to pay my bills? — they’re searching for “make more money.”
3. I want to lose weight but don’t want to give up the foods I love – they’re searching for “low fat/Keto versions of a recipe.”

After you do the work to discover this information, that’s the time that we hop into Pinterest and start using the Guided Search Tool.

 

How to use Pinterest’s Guided Search

When you first run a search in Pinterest, the first thing you’ll notice is that Pinterest will add more keywords and phrases to your search. These suggestions are based on what active users are currently searching for on the visual search site.

 

 

And can you see the different colored boxes listed under your results? Pinterest is sharing with you even more options for your keywords that are actively being searched on Pinterest.

Reading from the left side, the first keyword in the boxes is the word with the highest traffic. And it works it way down the list based on the order of the most highly searched terms down to the least ones.

 

 

We can also use these keyword boxes as a way to find what the search world calls ‘long tail keywords.’

Long tail keywords are 3 – 4 keyword phrases which are specific to the content that you’re pinning. When a Pinner uses a specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for something specific that they want to learn more about, buy or read.

And when you can get that specific with your keywords, you have a greater chance to convert that repin into a click to your website.

To find the long tail keywords for your content, click on the first box under your search results. Keep clicking on the options for the keyword boxes until you no longer see anymore boxes appear.

Once you’ve reached the end of the long tail path, you should have a very specific keyword phrase that describes the content of your pin. Now you can add this keyword-rich phrase in your pin’s headline and in the pin description.

 

 

Develop Your Pinning Strategy

Now that we’ve worked through how to use Pinterest, it’s time to pull all of this together into your pinning strategy.

1. Pin Daily and Consistently

One of the most important things to remember about Pinterest is that they they want you to consistently use the program. And loading up your scheduler in Tailwind is NOT the same as logging in and pinning new pins to your boards.

Even if you can only do 15 minutes a day, Pinterest rewards those of us who are active on the site by increasing our ranking in their searches.

Pinning consistently is just like the steps we go through to ensure that we’re blogging consistently. It’s about making it a priority to be consistent with sharing our content to ensure that the program continues to send you more traffic to your site.

Think about those spare 15 minutes when you would have logged into Instagram and just hop into Pinterest and pin about 10 pins from your home feed or the Following feed.

 

2. Add in Fresh Content

Some of you might be wondering ‘what makes content fresh?’ Does it have to be a totally new image or could it be an old image that gets re-pinned?

Pinterest’s answer is: “It doesn’t have to be a totally new image. Other categories count as fresh as well, such as a new pin from an older blog post or an old image re-pinned with fresh and more relevant descriptions.”

What falls under the idea of Fresh Content?

• A new Pin for your email opt-in or anything else you want to promote { not Repin }
• A Pin for a new blog post
• A new image for an old blog post

Spend some time every week thinking about how you can create several pins that are linked back to the same web page.  This process works best when you have evergreen content that’s already gaining traction on Pinterest. You can then create another pin using a new image with a different headline and keywords in the pin description.

Do some research using Pinterest’s Guided Search bar for new keyword phrases and hashtags that you can add to the pin description. Using different keywords gives your content the opportunity to show up in different keyword searches.

 

3. Create Engaging Pins

Making pins for Pinterest means more than just understanding how to use Canva or Picmonkey. You want to make sure that your pins all have these items included:

 

4. Use the seasons and timelines to create a pinning content calendar

Pinterest users start searching for specific holidays at least 2 – 3 months before the holiday or timeline date. And what I mean by a timeline date could be content for prom or when school starts or getting your financial stuff in order for tax time.

It takes about 3 months before your pin gets integrated into the Pinterest search. If you want people to read your blog post about summer vacation with your kids, then you need to start pinning that post in March.

And don’t forget to develop your content calendar to include your Pinterest content! Working out your calendar 2 – 3 months ahead of time will help you plan out what you can write about that will be searched for in the next 2 – 3 months.

 

Be Patient with the Process

As with anything else that we do with our business and blogs, be patient with the process.

You are not going to go viral overnight. No matter how great and amazing your content is, the program just doesn’t work that way.

And know this – your success comes from focusing on sharing good content not from obsessing over your numbers. All of those follower and monthly views don’t mean a thing if you’re not providing a solution to what your customers and readers are looking for in their online search.

Don’t worry if you’re not where you want to be yet – all great things on Pinterest take time.

 

 

Need more help with your Pinterest Process?

If you need more help with your Pinterest Process, I’ve pulled together a 25-page Pinterest Process Workbook to give you simple easy to follow action steps to give you clarity with your Pinterest strategy.

What you’ll learn:

• Understand how Pinterest decides which pins show up in the feed
• How to get more people to repin your blog posts, products and services
• Step-by-step process to create a personalized Pinterest strategy
• Monitor what’s working and what needs tweaking

You’ll also get a tracking guide that you can customize to monitor your Pinterest marketing plans so you can see which boards you should be pinning to and where to focus your time on Pinterest. Plus, you’ll get printable tracking worksheets to use every month to track your progress … all of this cool stuff for just $34 bucks!

Click here to get your instant download of The Pinterest Process Workbook.