Pinterest is the 14th largest social network in the world.
Many small business owners and bloggers overlook the platform by thinking that it’s only used to look up recipes and hobby ideas.
These top brands are leveraging Pinterest to the max with killer marketing strategies and valuable resources:
- Anthropologie
- BirchBox
- Martha Stewart
- The Today Show
- Real Simple
- Style Me Pretty
- Etsy
- Apartment Therapy
- Whole Foods
- Better Home and Gardens
If you’re trying to grow your Pinterest influence but aren’t sure how to plan and execute a successful Pinterest strategy for your brand, here are 18 ways to get more Pinterest traffic.
Getting Started On Pinterest 2024
Pinterest is an image search engine where you can find and share curated content – the best of what users want to read – on just about any topic.
The biggest trick to growing your Pinterest traffic is knowing your audience and sharing good-quality images and links.
In the tips that follow, we’ll show you the best ways to create, manage, and grow your Pinterest traffic, widen your influence, and get ranked on major search engines.
Let’s start with the basics.
Complete Your Private Profile On Pinterest
If you don’t already have a Pinterest account, navigate to https://pinterest.com/, which will redirect you to your regional Pinterest site.
You can also download the app for your mobile device from your preferred app store.
Use these 4 steps to set up your private profile:
- Once you have created a basic account, open the app on your device and log in.
- Tap your profile picture or placeholder to open your dashboard. This is usually located in the launcher bar at the bottom-right of your screen.
- Tap the burger menu (3 dots) in the top-right of your screen to navigate to Settings or to copy your profile link to share with friends.
- In Settings, tap on Public Profile to edit your profile picture, user name, bio, and website information.
For more information, check out the Pinterest FAQ and Support pages to edit your profile here.
Set Up A Pinterest Business Profile
This is the first step to growing your business or brand on Pinterest.
To gain access to insights, analytics, ads, and other tools, make sure you’re not using a personal account to post and pin your links or products.
There are two ways to create a business account on Pinterest:
- Navigate to Account Settings (in the Settings tab), which is also where you’ll find your login options. Here, you can convert your private account to a business account with seamless integration and very little change to your existing profile.
- Scroll to the bottom of your Settings tab to find the Actions center. Here, you can add a new private account, connect an existing account, or create a new business account to drive traffic and awareness to your brand.
The steps to complete your business profile are the same for both methods.
To minimize the number of notifications you may receive on a daily basis, we recommend that you use your business email (the one you run your business with) to set up your business account and keep your private email and inbox separate from your personal notifications:
- Enter your company name and website information.
- Select your business category.
- Choose your ad preferences.
- Click done.
Browse through the new account popups in your new business account:
- When prompted, select Explore Your Profile.
- Click the nut icon in the top-right of your screen to access Settings.
- Edit profile details such as company name, user name, about, website, and email address.
Set up Your Shop and Catalog
Before you can start sharing your products and pins, you need to set up your product catalog and a Shop tab:
- Tap your brand profile picture or placeholder to open your business dashboard. This is usually located in the launcher bar at the bottom-right of your screen.
- Tap the burger menu (3 dots) in the top-right of your screen to navigate to Settings, copy your profile link to share with customers, or edit your cover image.
- At the top of your screen and to the left of the 3 dots, you will find the Analytics icon for your brand’s Pinterest account.
You can set up a Shop tab for your brand’s business account by creating a catalog that relies on your data source.
This is a file that contains your product listings and their details.
Click HERE to check if the Shop and Catalog feature is available in your region.
Create Pins That Direct To Valuable Resources
As a Pinterest influencer, you will know that pins that link to valuable resources are more likely to grow your following and generate traffic than pins of less value.
Latest Pinterest algorithm updates indicate that “valuable resources” are those pins that link out to blog posts, training resources, printables, recipe cards, and templates that provide value to the reader.
Here are two ways to ensure that your pins direct visitors to valuable resources:
- Make sure your website has a blog that’s full of useful information and handy resources. This is known as pinnable content.
- Create pinnable images. This is a little tricky and may require a graphic designer or some prior knowledge of apps like Canva. Unlike a blog post (which generally looks and loads better when images are displayed in landscape mode), Pinterest works best with images in portrait mode.
Tips to drive more traffic from Pinterest to your blog
- Do Pinterest keyword research
- Include keywords in your Pin titles and descriptions
- Use related keywords in your Board titles and descriptions
- Match your blog post title
- Create curiosity with your Pins
- Make your Pins stand out
- Apply for Rich Pins
Elements to Help you Create Pins that Direct to Valuable Resources 2024
So, you’re not a designer, but you’re comfortable enough with Canva or Paint to think you can create your own pins.
Here is some insight into the layout and format of the best pinnable images:
- Use catchy, interesting pin titles
- Vertical (portrait) orientation works best
- Make sure your images are at least 600 x 900 pixels (with a preferred 1000 x 1500 pixels which are the same as a 2:3 ratio)
- Use an aspect ratio of 2:3 or 1:3.5 when cropping and resizing your images
- Create mosaics with no more than three separate images for maximum impact
- If using a text overlay on your image, be sure to check the text placement and color blend with the background image, taking care to ensure that your text overlay does not obliterate important product information, or disappear into backgrounds of the same color
- Always use rich text options (bold, italic, oblique, highlights) that make the words pop on screen
- Use rich and descriptive alt text on your images so they can be read aloud by screen-readers in accessibility mode.
Canva offers some great FREE templates and more advice on mastering the art of Pinterest images HERE.
Top 7 Tips To Increase Pinterest Traffic
Pinterest is the #1 shopping platform among millennials and is fast becoming the go-to for older generations, too.
In fact, Pinterest shoppers spend 40% more than shoppers on other platforms and twice as much in a month.
Therefore growing your followers on Pinterest is the first step to becoming a successful seller with major Pinterest traffic.
Consider reaching an audience that is not already part of your Pinterest network by creating relevant pins for a wider audience.
In this way, Pinterest will see your pins and your account as having more authority, and start displaying your pins in users’ “Picked for You” home feed more often.
This gives you the potential to reach even more people.
1. Become Connected to Your Audience
Here are more top tips to help you grow your Pinterest reach:
Maintain Your Profile
Make sure that your bio (on a private account) and the About section (on a business account) are relevant and up-to-date.
Review this every few months.
Know Your Audience
If ads are available in your region, use analytics to craft a targeted campaign using demographics to narrow your search.
You can also check out these audience stats from Hootsuite to help you create an audience profile.
Follow Your Competitor’s Followers
The reasons for this are pretty straightforward: Joe over there doesn’t know he has options unless you show them to him.
Browse the Popular Feed for Trending Pins
Get a feel for what your audience is browsing, pick up some great design inspiration, or just repin something to your own boards.
Find and Join Relevant Group Boards
Become a contributor when you ask to join board groups relevant to your brand, company, or interests.
Build a following based on your individual influence when you comment, share and repin.
Use Infographics
Pinners LOVE infographics! Make your infographics more relevant by using up-to-date statistics and information sources to build your pins.
Be Original
More than anything, pinners prefer being unique and repinning original content and images.
Perform Routine Maintenance on Your Pins
Delete poor-performing pins and revive older pins by regularly checking your account ad insights and analytics.
2. Optimize Your Pinterest Account For SEO
Gone are the days when SEO was reserved for blogs and web pages.
If you have content out there on the internet, optimizing it is the best way to grab SEO attention from major search engines.
Because Pinterest is essentially a search engine, your content should be readable, clickable, optimized, and discoverable.
Use keyword-rich descriptions and hashtags that keep you trending in relevant searches.
However, Pinterest is not like other social media platforms, blogs, or websites.
Optimizing your Pinterest account and pins means you will have to pay more attention to social shares, repins, and engagement metrics than to backlinks and the technical SEO optimization techniques you may be familiar with.
Let’s get started:
Optimize Your Profile for SEO
Choose an SEO-friendly user name.
Remember that your audience will use keywords to find what they’re looking for, so think about slipping a “natural-sounding” keyword into your user name.
Your username is included in your profile’s URL when you share or when the audience searches, so understanding what your audience might be searching for is key (know your audience).
Set up Your Website for Pinterest SEO
Ranking on search engines is great but to truly trend, you’ve got to rank on social media platforms, too.
With nearly 450 million active users per month, Pinterest is an active, vibrant platform that presents unique product awareness opportunities for business owners and SEO professionals who need to boost their traffic numbers and have tried all other social media platforms (with or without success).
Understanding and implementing Pinterest SEO principles to your website can also help you optimize content and pages for better search visibility because the process forces you to be more aware of your current SEO strategies and shortcomings.
Thus, optimizing for Pinterest SEO translates into fewer errors, better rankings, and a cleaner, more user-friendly website experience for your audience.
Set up Accurate Reporting on Your Pinterest SEO Efforts
When you share data from your website, you know that people are going to be clicking on your pins to visit your blog or website.
It makes sense to link your assets together for a more seamless experience:
- Set up your Pinterest conversion reporting tools by getting started with the Pinterest tag, which is similar to the Facebook pixel, and helps you create conversion events for your website and segment your audience for better targeting.
- Add the Save/Pin It button to your website so users can convert any image into a pin. You can also find the Google Chrome extension here.
- Grow your Pinterest traffic and followers by verifying your website. This tracks pinners’ activities related to your pins, and your profile picture will also show on any pin that originated from your website.
There are three ways to do this:
- Add an HTML tag to your website
- Upload an HTML file to your website
- Add a DNS TXT record to your website.
3. Optimize Your Pin Descriptions And Board Names For SEO
One of the best ways to make your profile, pins, and boards accessible to search engines is to use best practices to set up your account, pins, and boards so search engines can find you.
Use Pinterest Sections
Pinterest sections are boards within boards (or sub-boards) that help to categorize and sort larger boards so they’re easier to browse.
Instead of browsing one long page of search results and pins, users are now aware of what else each board has to offer.
This widens the user’s awareness of your brand and products.
Create a Welcoming Environment for Your Pins
Make sure you have created the correct boards and sub-boards for your pins.
This will help you accurately share pins to the right categories.
Use Keyword Research to Optimize Your Pin Descriptions and Board Names
Keyword-optimized descriptions should ideally contain your business name, board name, and one or more keywords.
Let’s look at an example, using “lentil burger” as our product:
(search term)
The Flaming Vegan sizzling Lentil Burger recipe that everyone’s talking about!
(business name) (niche topic) (social proof)
In this example, you can clearly see how the pin has been optimized for the brand name, search term, descriptive keywords in a niche topic, and also motivates everyone to click it because they’d like to know what everyone is talking about (This is FOMO, the fear of missing out on what everyone else is doing).
These three tips should help you better understand user search behavior, and guide your keyword research for your specific niche:
- Use Guided Search on Pinterest, which helps users find more relevant results by narrowing the focus of the search.
- Then check if your best-performing keywords on Google can be used as Promoted Pins in Pinterest.
- Finally, explore niche topics on Pinterest by first typing in your category (eg. food) and then choosing your sub-category (eg. recipes), followed by your sub-sub-category (burgers).
At this point, you can narrow down the search quite efficiently by using your niche query (eg. lentil burgers) as a way to determine the best board names and pin descriptions for your pins.
4. Repin And Engage Consistently
While Pinterest may be one of the fastest-growing shopping platforms out there at the moment, you need to engage with your followers across all social media points to truly impact shopping behavior.
For those not yet shopping on Pinterest, other platforms will also bring you, buyers.
It is vitally important that all your platforms are kept up to date, and consistently share content with the same look and feel like the rest.
To do this, begin with the end in mind, even if that means recreating the same image in different sizes and size ratios for different platforms.
Again, think about using a tool like Canva to create your pins.
Some of the great features available include Magic Resize, sharing to various social media platforms (with automatic scalability), and the ability to collaborate and edit across teams.
The Pinterest algorithm notes your consistent pinning behavior with high-quality content (valuable resources), which leads to an increase in impressions and your content being shown to other pinners more often.
5. Pin To A Group Board
Feeling adventurous?
Start your own group board!
Follow these three easy steps to do that:
- Choose which Pinterest board you’d like to convert into a group board.
- Tap on the plus icon under the board title at the top of your page.
- Invite collaborators and pinners to join your group board by searching their names or email addresses on Pinterest.
6. Apply For Rich Pins
If products, articles, or recipes are from the content on your website, you’ll need to add rich meta tags to those web pages as part of the SEO process.
Once done, validate that your content has been correctly marked up by using the Pinterest Rich Pins Validator.
If your markup is correct, Pinterest will display an approval message that indicates your application for rich pins has been confirmed.
There are four different types of Rich Pins you can use:
- App Rich Pins, which display an install button for your apps so users can download your app directly.
- Article Rich Pins, which display the author, meta description, and title of the blog post.
- Product Rich Pins link to product pages and show the most up-to-date pricing and availability information on your products.
- Recipe Rich Pins, which display the title, serving size, cooking time, ratings, and ingredient list.
7. Find The Peak Hours
This comes back to audience insights again.
Knowing when your audience is online and likely to read your pins helps you post and pin on time, which should be a long-view strategy of your content strategy.
Your audience demographics will tell you what time zone to use, but generally, all pinners display the same browsing and shopping behavior.
Below are some tips for best and worst times to pin:
- BEST: Late night on Fridays and Saturdays (between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.) and early Saturday and Sunday mornings (from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m.)
- WORST: During the working day Monday to Friday, and evenings while pinners are still commuting.
Tips to Get Pinterest Traffic for Bloggers 2024
For bloggers who sell using woo commerce or an online shopping portal on their website, generating blog traffic that creates a sale is probably the hardest part of blogging.
With Pinterest’s phenomenal growth in shoppers during the pandemic times, it makes good business sense to use the platform to create awareness amongst potential shoppers and lead them to your website.
Although most of these steps have already been covered above, we include a short checklist here:
- Decide which posts you want to pin.
- Create a new pin or select an already-formatted image to pin.
- Write an optimized pin description (this should already form part of your alt text for the image on your website).
- Add the Save/Pin It button to your blog post
- Pin your blog post to the correct boards and board groups.
- Track Pinterest traffic to your blog.
Additional Tips to Get Pinterest Traffic to Your Blog
Follow a Few People or Brands in Your Niche
Look for influencers in your niche.
If your content is rich enough and of a high enough quality, you may be able to create additional followers who are shopping around for alternatives and weren’t aware of other options in your niche.
Create Your Original Content
When you first join Pinterest, pinning other people’s pins seemed simple enough.
Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s time to start pinning original content if you want to stand out from the crowd.
After all, why would a pinner repin a story or video pin from your site when there are others just like it to choose from?
By creating your original content, you add value to the pinner, increasing your chances of being shared and interacted with.
Use Social Sharing Icons
Generate even more awareness across other platforms by using social media sharing icons for Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or Instagram.
For best results, use the official brand icons that users are familiar with.
Use MiloTree To Create Customizable Pop-Ups
Having more Pinterest traffic means you increase your likes, repins, and impressions.
This will boost your website traffic and generate leads, which increases your sales.
To increase your traffic, use a smart pop-up builder like MiloTree to convert your blog traffic to followers across social media and your email list.
An easy-to-use pop-up customizer, MiloTree lets you change backgrounds, text, and button colors.
You can customize the display position on your blog and when it appears (immediately, delayed, or action-based).
MiloTree is available as a WordPress plugin or can be added to any other site with a short line of javascript code to install the popup.
Include a Call-to-Action in Your Pin Descriptions
One of the most overlooked tricks to encourage users to buy or pinners to repin is a call-to-action button or CTA.
This prompts the user to perform some kind of action, such as “add to shopping cart” or “download now”.
For maximum results, use between 150-300 words in your pin descriptions.
Use Hashtags In Your Pinterest Descriptions
Add suggested hashtags to the descriptions of your Pins by typing “#” and your keyword or keyphrase.
Be specific and descriptive, but keep it short enough for users to understand.
In our burger example above, this may look something like #FlamingVeganLentilBurger.
You can use capital letters to break up the words in your hashtag if it reads better, such as when multiple vowels are used next to each other, like #weeatmeat (we eat meat).
Customize Your Save And Follow Buttons With The Widget Builder
A little-known secret, Pinterest has its own widget builder you can use to create customized Save or Follow buttons.
The widget builder can also be used to embed a pin on your site, show your latest pins, or highlight pins from your favorite boards.
Why is Pinterest Great for Driving Blog Traffic?
- It’s a traffic magnet, a place to display the best your site has to offer
- It relies mostly on organic traffic, driven by shared pins
- It continues to show an upward trend in growth
- It is a search engine and the results of a search always lead to the links attached to pins
- It offers a more targeted search niche
- It’s easier to rank
- Its content remains evergreen because of such targeted searches
How to Increase Pinterest Traffic according to Reddit:
To boost your Pinterest presence, regularly create fresh pins, optimize your profile and boards, and incorporate relevant keywords in titles and descriptions. Engaging with users and joining niche group boards can also enhance visibility and encourage pin sharing.
You might be interested to check those related posts as well:
- How to Successfully Post on Pinterest in 2024 [7 Content Types]
- 36 Best Pinterest Strategies 2024 [Learn Digital Marketing]
- How to Write Perfect Pinterest Descriptions [2024 Guide]
FAQ
How many monthly viewers on Pinterest are good?
To a large extent, Pinterest monthly viewers matter because they tell the Pinterest algorithm that your site is trending, which means you show up in more searches and increase the chances of a sale, a follow, a repin, or a link click.
Do Pinterest bloggers make money?
Yes!
Pinterest drives blog traffic a lot faster and easier than Google, especially for new bloggers.
When used correctly and consistently – and by creating high-quality valuable resources – Pinterest can help your blog make money through display advertising, affiliate links, or direct product sales.
How much traffic do you get from Pinterest?
As with any other social media platform, growth is measured through organic traffic on Pinterest.
Organic Pinterest traffic is driven by interaction with followers and relies on a “word of mouth” or referral and sharing system that tells pinners and searchers that your brand is trustworthy and carries authority when you make recommendations that will cost them money.
Pinterest’s audience consists of mainly high-income users, including 41% who earn more than $75,000 per year, and 47% of whom are ready to buy (ready-to-buy figures for Facebook are 15% and Instagram 11%).
Most people buying on Pinterest do so once they’re already aware of their pain points.
This means they’re already in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel and are now trying to find the best solution to solve their problem.
In the end, how much traffic your website or blog gets from Pinterest will be determined by a number of factors, including audience demographics, quality of pins, and the niche you choose to work in.
Conclusion
Although Pinterest is considered to be a social media platform, it’s actually a visual search engine, much like Google Image Search.
With millions of people searching Pinterest on a daily basis, Pinterest has put less focus on the number of followers, and more on encouraging users to follow specific interests instead of specific pinners.
This is why it’s become so hard to increase your following on Pinterest.
Use the tips and tricks learned here to create a high-quality experience for your user, and increase your Pinterest traffic and sales like a pro!
