If 69% of online consumers are going to Pinterest with intent to purchase items, why not take advantage, and help improve your sales and web traffic with Pinterest? Speaking of visitors, most Pinners, 80% of Pinners, are accessing Pinterest on their phone, which means they’re then being directed to your website mobily (cough *mobilegeddon* cough).
With so many ways to improve traffic and rankings, and now mobile rankings, Pinterest presents a unique opportunity to achieve these goals and become one of the largest traffic drivers in the social realm. Follow these tips to help improve your company Pinterest page, presence, and website traffic.
1. Start With The Basics – Optimizing Your Pinterest Profile
A company Pinterest profile should define who the company is: their goals, passions, and interests. This makes Pinterest one of the best social networks to define a brand, offering consumers an inside look using brand boards and unique pins.
Each board can represent a different service offered, as well as interests the company shares. For example, does your team make a daily trip to the coffeeshop around the corner? Then add a coffee board to row 3 or 4 of your Pinterest profile with snapshots of the crew, as well as popular coffee pins. Anywhere from 12-20 boards are appropriate for a company Pinterest profile. Develop catchy titles, with keywords, for each board and properly source each pin with a connecting URL to the website or blog.
The Pinterest profile description at the top needs to include exactly what a company does, with few keywords. I tend to use the same biography in all of my social profiles to keep consistency and branding throughout. Pinterest is no different. If you’re including brand keywords in the Twitter description, share the same description on Pinterest. Just because you have extra characters, doesn’t mean you have to fill them with keyword stuffing. Make the description natural, yet attractive, giving Pinners a real reason to follow.
2. Verify Your Website, Verify Your Credibility
Pinterest is getting better and better in preventing spammy Pinners from reaching users. One of their methods to the spam-stopping-madness is by offering a “verify your website” button. If you know how to navigate your website’s backend, verifying your website is a synch. Pinterest offers an easy to follow instruction guide for installing a meta tag or uploading an HTML Pinterest file to verify. If a Pinterest profile is verified, it’s more likely to be showed to more Pinners, helping to increase page popularity and click-through.
3. Rich Pins Can Make You Rich
Rich Pins are designed to make the pinning experience more enjoyable for consumers, and more efficient for companies. Instead of trying to stuff every detail about a product in the description, Rich Pins allow proper separation of product detail from a fun, catchy description. It’s a balance between the headline and body text for Pins.
Image Source: Whiteglovesocialmedia.com
In a study by Shopify, adding prices to pins averaged 1.5 likes, against pins that didn’t have a price at 1.1 likes. Appreciate that 0.4 difference, because as Pinterest pointed out last holiday season, over two million peopleadd a Product Pin to their boards daily. That’s a lot of opportunity, and potential for increasing traffic from a Rich Pin to it’s product page.
Don’t have products to sell? Don’t worry! Pinterest has multiple Rich Pin offers:
4. Backlink Your Pins For Increased Traffic
This is a big one, and quite possibly the best way to increase traffic from Pinterest. Keep in mind, there’s a right way to do this and a very wrong Spammy Mc. Spammer type of way to backlink your pins.
On your own pins, not pins off of the popular page, add a relevant url from your website or blog as the pin’s “source”. Include that image on the actual page or have a relevant image that relates to the pin’s description. If you tell me I can learn how to knit in 5 simple steps, don’t send me to a construction company in New York. I’m a San Diegan, we’re very different.
5. Did Someone Say Link Building?
Bloggers and Pinners are bestfriends. Together, they shape cuticles, casseroles, and take cute cat photos. Thousands of bloggers have caught on to the many opportunities Pinterest offers as a traffic source and creates pin-worthy images to attach to posts. With that many bloggers regularly using Pinterest and having Pin It buttons on their website, it’s easy to find different guest posting opportunities through Pinterest’s Guided Search.
In the search bar at the top of Pinterest, type in a relevant topic to your industry (ie: social media). Add a couple of keywords provided by the Guided Search option and let the hundreds of relevant pins and Pinners appear before your eyes. Pins with caption overlays, like descriptions offering, “5 steps to anything”, are most likely going to be bloggers. Click through the pins and follow Pinners to start exploring the many bloggers behind Pinterest, just waiting for your un-automated guest post email. Despite the argued debate, the guest posts and relationships with relevant bloggers can help improve your overall rankings and “site juice”. Just don’t be a Spammy Mc. Spammer!
6. Make Life Easy for Pinners – Install a Pin it Button on Your Website
Make it easy for users to share content directly from your website and add it to their favorite boards with Pin It buttons. The Pin It button can help get more referral traffic to a site when people click on Pins. People save images from a website to Pinterest, allowing more people to discover and repin them. In fact, the average Pin gets 11 repins.
Each Pinable image on a website needs to have an optimized description and title to further help with rankings. Pinterest will grab the image description and attach it to the pin automatically when a user pins it from a site. Increase ranking chances by providing a keyword-rich description a user is attracted to. You don’t want the Pinner changing your perfectly optimized description to, “I love it!” As much as we love it too, that kind of caption doesn’t do anything for rankings. Provide the Pinner with a relatable caption they’ll want to keep, referencing the company and proper keywords.
7. Attract Who You’re Attracted To
Wedding dress designers could care less about a construction company’s Pinterest page, and even less to join a “Construction Hats” board. Relevancy, as with anything online, is vital to growing engagement and traffic. Search for Pinners that are in your industry, as well as related industries to follow. Take it a step further and interact with the demographic by commenting on their new pins, asking to be a part of their group boards, and hearting your favorite pins they’ve shared. New Pinners will be more likely to visit your company profile, and eventually your website, if they can relate to the business in some way.
8. Pin Blog Images
Blog images make great pins and repins to help increase traffic with. Using photo editing tools, like Picmonkeyor Canva, create different collages, add text overlays, increase the image contrast and quality so it’s unique for Pinterest. Get creative with your Pinterest pins and follow image trends on the popular page to see what’s getting repinned the most. Unsure of what works best on Pinterest? Curalate conducted a Pinterest image study and found the following information about pins on Pinterest:
- “Images that contain less than 30 percent background (e.g. whitespace) are repinned the most.”
- “The most repinned images have multiple colors: Images with multiple dominant colors have 3.25 times more repins per image than images with a single dominant color.”
- “Very light and very dark images are not repinned as often. In fact, the repinning rate for images of medium lightness is 20 times higher than for images that are mostly black, and eight times higher than images that are mostly white.”
- “Brand images without faces receive 23 percent more repins. Less than 1/5 of images on Pinterest today have the presence of faces.”
9. Promote a Contest With Pins
Pinning images with contest details on Pinterest, while hosting the contest on your website, can help increase traffic from Pinterest to a site. For the “source” of each pin, include the contest page URL so Pinners are redirected to the correct page and are more likely to enter and repin. Uploading pins or pinning directly from a contest page will also encourage traffic from users who normally wouldn’t have visited the page in the first place, especially if repinning is an extra entry into the contest.
Have you noticed a lot of your traffic coming from Pinterest? Share your tips in the comments below!