Pinterest SEO Strategy: How to Improve Visibility and Traffic

'Strategy' sounds like a big word for what's really a short list of decisions, made in the right order. In practice, a Pinterest SEO strategy is the order in which you settle five questions: what you are promoting, which phrases describe it, where those phrases go, what the pin and page promise, and how you will judge the result.

What decisions make up a Pinterest SEO strategy?

A Pinterest SEO strategy is five decisions, and the order matters because each one leans on the one before it.

1. Pick one topic and one search intent. Choose something you actually want people to reach, such as a product, a service or a blog post. If you cannot name the page, you are not ready to design the pin.
2. Gather the phrases people actually use. Search Pinterest for your topic, note the related phrases and trend signals it shows, and keep the ones a customer would really say and that honestly describe your content.
3. Put those phrases where Pinterest reads them. That means the profile, the boards, the pin title and description, and the destination page. Where to use keywords on Pinterest maps each spot.
4. Make the image and the page keep the pin's promise. The searcher should see the same idea in the picture, the words and the page they land on.
5. Review, then refine. Check how pins perform, then improve or replace the ones that are weak or out of date.

Here is the sequence worked through once. The topic is Pinterest SEO for handmade product businesses, aimed at one page on your site that explains it. The phrases come from searching that topic on Pinterest. They go into the profile, a board, the pin title and description, and the page. The image and page repeat the same promise, and a review date is set to check what happened.

How specific should Pinterest SEO phrases be?

Specific enough that you can say who would type the phrase and what they hope to find. A phrase that could belong to any business gives you nothing to build a board, a title or a page around, so it fails the second decision.

Test each candidate against the page you chose in the first decision. If more than one page could answer the phrase, narrow it until only one fits. Then read it aloud inside an ordinary sentence, and if it sounds forced, keep the idea and change the wording.

What goes wrong when a decision is skipped or made out of order?

Each decision protects the next one, so a gap shows up further down the line:

• Skipping the first decision leaves pins with no page to lead to, so a click has nothing to accomplish.
• Placing phrases before gathering them means guessing at words instead of using the ones searchers actually use.
• Skipping the match between pin and page sends visitors somewhere that says something different from what they clicked for.
• Skipping the review means the next round repeats whatever was not working.

A longer list of account-level problems is in the Pinterest SEO mistakes guide.

How do you know whether the strategy is working?

Watch impressions, saves and outbound clicks, and add website analytics if you have them so you can see what visitors do after they arrive. Timing is uneven: a few pins get seen right away, others need weeks or months, and an older pin can start performing later. Change one thing at a time and note the date.

Where does an audit fit into your strategy?

An audit checks the five decisions against what your account actually says. The Pinterest SEO Audit from Marie Glow Studio ranks its findings into a 30-day action plan, so you fix the most important thing first instead of everything at once. If you would rather try a first pass yourself, start with how to perform a Pinterest SEO audit.

Pinterest sits alongside your Google SEO, email marketing and other channels rather than replacing them, and no strategy can guarantee traffic or sales. What a clear strategy does is give every pin a reason to exist.