Are you confused about search engine optimization for Pinterest, do you want to know what's the best strategy for 2020? What are the ranking factors? And what helps your pins show high search results and Pinterest knowing these SEO factors and including them into my Pinterest strategy is exactly how I get over three hundred thousand monthly pages of free organic traffic to my blog from Pinterest.
Hi, I'm Anastasia of AnastasiaBlogger. com. I'm a Pinterest marketing expert and on this channel I share my Pinterest tips every Thursday.
If that's what you want to learn about click subscribe and hit the Bell button to get notified when my new videos go live. Now, before I jump into answering all of these questions, I want to give you a reason to stick with me until the end of this video. A very good reason.
And the reason is, while I'll talk about various SEO factors Pinterest is using to rank your pins, you will still need a clear road map and an action plan and they'll give it to you in my Pinterest SEO checklist printable file. I'll give you the link at the end of the video, so stay tuned. So how does Pinterest categorize repins?
The first factor, and I think it's the most important one I wanted to talk about is pin titles. Why I think it's the most important that's based on especially the most recent update we've seen on Pinterest when if we go to any of our pins, you will see the title is over here on top of the pin and you will see that being title field. It has been added on Pinterest for about a couple of months.
And also another news that was last week's news. The Tailwind scheduler also now is showing the field for pin title. Look at this.
It's a new field and they even give you some instructions how you can add this PIN titles if you automatically if it doesn't show automatically for most of the sites, it should show automatically. But anyway, this new field means that Pinterest wants to give us more control over our pin titles, because previously, if your site had Rich pins validated and if they were working correctly, then your rich pin would bring the PIN title from your blog post. But nowadays you can edit any of your pins if you want and test any other keywords.
And this will overwrite your PIN title from the blog post or from your webpage. Last week I made a great video about this news of this new pin title Field on Tailwind. I'll give you a link to that video in the top right corner.
It will be above my head. And also just a couple of words about the titles. You need to know that they have to be up to one hundred characters, but only the first 30 to 35 characters are likely to show in people's feeds.
What Pinterest means here is that when you go to the Home feed on Pinterest, you will see that most of the pins are showing some kind of titles. These are the titles of the pins, right? If I open it, you will see this is the title.
If the title was longer than this, then it would show only the first 30 to 35 characters, like, for example, specifically on my pin. You see, I have a much longer title. And what happens here, it just shows the beginning of the title and then it just ends in the middle of the text.
It's no problem at all, but is just a fact. You just need to keep in mind the focus keyword should be closer to the beginning of your title. It's quite rare situation on Pinterest, but it still happens that some of the pins will not have any PIN titles or any text under them.
So for example, I found this pin. This is not a common situation, but apparently this user doesn't know how to add or to add titles or even PIN descriptions. So this PIN is a very rare situation when it has nothing, no text at all.
But for most of the pins you will see either PIN title or sometimes if the PIN title is missing you. You may see instead of the PIN title, part of the PIN description taking this space underneath the pin. So now we're moving to the next fact.
The ranking factor is pin description. So sometimes Pinterest doesn't even show pin descriptions when when you're in when you're trying to repins something, especially on a mobile device. A lot of people are telling me now this and actually I noticed the same on my my Pinterest app, that even if my original PIN, my original pin or anybody else's original pin did have a PIN description, when I'm trying to save it using my mobile app, Pinterest just removes it.
Now, when this happens, I just want to tell you that you need to keep calm because things like this happen on Pinterest from time to time. Very recently there was for about a couple of months. There was a big problem when people who had been description's on their websites and they were trying to save something on desktop computers, Pinterest wasn't showing those titles.
The field was empty and you couldn't do anything. You couldn't add, you couldn't add pin descriptions. So that was really weird.
And luckily it was fixed. Now we're seeing a similar problem on mobile devices. So I'm not sure what Pinterest is doing.
Maybe they're just testing things out and seeing if it's worth keeping descriptions or not. But for now, we know that pin descriptions, even if they're not shown in the feed of the user, they're still a ranking factor. So you want to include in the description, you want to include the keywords and hashtags.
There's a common misconception about pin descriptions. People are getting confused between the description that comes from your site and description. Description that comes from your site is often not seen in any way because the only way to I'm able to see it on my desktop computers to click by clicking on this more about this this pin and then it shows me the post, see your description that comes with the Rich pin.
So if you have issues with Rich pins, you will not even be able to get this information to your pin. But anyway, what the PIN description is, is something that you are adding when you're saving this pin from your site or when you're uploading and using this pin save button. The PIN description is this longer description that can include hashtags.
And when you're looking at a pin on Pinterest, you will always find this PIN description underneath the title, the name of your board. It will not be anywhere higher. It will always under the name of the board.
And if you click on edit your pin and you created it, you can always click at it and you will see where this description is. So this is a title and underneath you have the PIN description field. Now we're moving to the place number three, where you need to include your keywords, the focus keywords to rank high on Pinterest.
These are board names. So when you're saving a pin, you always want to make sure that the first board where it goes a it's on your personal account. It's not some group board on another person's account.
And B, this board has the focus keyword or at least is the most relevant on your account to the content of this pin. So we're talking about different board titles and a lot of people are asking me how many boards do I need? Sometimes people are just creating five or six boards or less than 10 boards and they think they're done with their Pinterest account set up.
That's just the very beginning. So the first 10 boards are the very beginning because you when when you have a lot of content on your side, you will start creating more and more boards, which will fit specifically each kind of topic on your on your website, or if it's an e-commerce site that fits each niche category on your site, each type of product on your site. So you need to have as many boards as you need that can support the amount of content on your website for each piece of content.
Pinterest recommends you having at least five relevant boards. I'm not making it up. It's from one of the interviews that Pinterest representatives gave.
They said they don't mind that you will save the same pin to five different boards, not in the same day. They never said that repetition like this. Saving Repins back to back is a good idea is just that you can save the same thing to five different boards that are all relevant somehow similar to the topic of your pin.
And that helps you to rank your in for different keywords, for related keywords and to show it to different types of searches. Right now, the place number four, where you can include all the focus keywords you want to for each board is board description. I was looking at my board right here.
It was here when you added your board settings, you will see the PIN description is a longer field. You can include up to five hundred characters. That means that you can include as many similar or relevant keywords as you need.
And a lot of people are asking if it's worth creating any more descriptions because you might notice pretty big accounts and Pinterest that don't have any board descriptions sometimes. I also don't even add more descriptions when I'm in a hurry to create a new board and then I forget to get back to it. So don't make this mistake, because really, if you're just telling yourself I'm going to create quickly this board and later I'll go, I'll get back to it, chances are you'll never get back to it.
So you have a lot of space here. And you you can add a lot of related keywords and you will help Pinterest understand what all the future repins you're going to save. There will be about and Pinterest has a ton of interesting information on their official Pinterest engineering blog.
On MediaVine, I always recommend everyone who wants to really dive deep into this Pinterest SEO topic to read from time to time what kind of post they publishing there. So it's interesting, but also for the most part, it's written for engineers, actually. So it's kind of hard to read this information.
And and I like checking those posts because they often mention things that will help us understand what are the parts of Pinterest SEO we might be totally missing. For example, in this recent post they were talking about understanding pins through keyword extraction and they mentioned several text sources. They used to extract keywords.
And I also believe that these sources are listed perhaps in the order to show us the hierarchy of this importance, importance of this text source. So the most important, as we see here, is the title and description. We already talked about it.
And they also mention here the URL, right. The URL of the page to which your pin is going to be linked. And in a sense, Pinterest is looking at your page URL the same way as Google does because they're looking for the focus keyword in your URL.
And we already talked about board names and descriptions. Right. So we'll skip this part.
And the next one I'm looking at, Pinterest is acting here again, just like Google would. They are checking your page, your your page to which you are linking and they're looking for keywords on your page, title and description. And I would say that the text source number five or the factor number five, we need to mention here, it's a very interesting tax source.
It's search queries that frequently lead to clicks on the pin. So this is similar to how Google is studying the user behavior on their search results page. Google is checking on which searches people are clicking in Pinterest case, as we see here, that Pinterest is going to see how often this pin is going to get clicks for each different keyword and then they will decide for which keyword it should be ranked better.
And one more text source. It's number six. Pinterest has mentioned here it's names of objects detected in the image using a visual classifier.
You probably noticed that when you're saving an image on Pinterest, even if it's a completely fresh image and you might even not include any keywords or anything. But just because of the objects that Pinterest can see on your pin itself, they will start showing in pins are related to this one. In more like this, they will start showing images that have similar objects.
So you remember the Pinterest is a visual search engine, right? This platform works pretty well with visual content on your repins and it can often identify objects on the images. And if you have a woman with a laptop or just a laptop on your photo, then Pinterest will definitely recognize the laptop as the object on the photo and will also attribute this keyword and will show your pin when to keywords related to this object.
And now I'm going to talk about an interesting related source of text where they grab the keywords, it's something that you might not expect. But actually so I was talking about detecting some objects on your images, but Pinterest went even further than this and they're now able to detect the text on your PIN images. So in there, another post that they have about pin cohesion, I will talk about it later.
It's as erecting a ranking factor. But one of the things they're mentioning here is that they have a system called OCR. So optical character recognition means that they're looking at your image and they find on the background either these letters or sometimes you can read this text overlay.
They understand from the text on the image which keywords they should attribute to this to this specific pin. And all of this information that I mentioned so far will be matched together between each other and Pinterest will use pin cohesion as a ranking factor. So what is this cohesion?
I would say in another word, maybe like consistency between all the signals that they are getting, all the keywords that they're getting from different all of these different sources. So this this is an article about building cohesion in this article, they're talking about how this raw signals that come from different sources, they need to be cohesive and then Pinterest will decide based on this consistency between the keywords that they're getting from different sources related to this being, they will understand if this pins has this been cohesion and then pin. should be ranked higher.
That's how I understand this ranking factor. It's called a rank, one of the ranking factors on Pinterest. The thing number eight that you need to know about Pinterest SEO.
I'm already running out of fingers, but it's going to be a little bit longer video. So another thing that you need to know about Pinterest search results is that they are quite heavily personalized and over time, Pinterest Pinterest team and one of their posts on that Medium blog, they're saying that over time these results will become even more personalized and relevant through advancement in machine learning ranking. What I'm trying to say here is that Pinterest is building a system to deliver content from various verticals, search verticals within one integrated search results page as they say, that today, if you search for something on Pinterest, you will see results from different verticals, from videos, from shopping and from the type of people that you follow.
Look at this scheme. This is something that Pinterest team is trying to understand, that they're trying to build a platform that will give you results from all of these different verticals, including pinner vertical, PIN, vertical video, vertical shopping, vertical and fresh pins, fresh content, vertical. And there is something else coming so Pinterest can check which verticals the user has seen recently for similar queries and what the user is engaging with more often, which kind of vertical the user is engaging more often.
And if the user didn't engage with some kind of verticals, then Pinterest will not show more of that vertical in the near future to this specific user. That's one of the ways that Pinterest explains that they are personalizing search results. Another very important fact that you need to know about Pinterest is your I think it's No.
9 is that Pinterest is also assigning the so-called interests to pins and they use them as one of the ranking factors. For example, if we look at this pin, the pin image we have here, a woman with a dog and it's now it's snowing or it has been snowing and these are the the interests that Pinterest assigns to this pin. So the platform thinks that the topic of dogs is one of the most relevant to this pin and then is mammals and animals in general is kind of less it's like less relevant because you see here the number one, and then skiing is very relevant and then snowboarding is very relevant and winter sports is more generic.
So it's not the exact match of the category. So you understand more or less relevant I'm in here and what they mean when they say about this interests. So when they use the interests, they kind of categorize your pin based on these interests and they understand for which searches and for which categories they should show your pin higher in search results.
And now I just wanted to go back to one of the things that I mentioned earlier when I said that Pinterest is recommending you to save your pins to multiple different boards or at least five words. If you look at one of the examples they mentioned in their blog post, they are showing you how just one pin can have annotations or can be associated with at least one, two, three, four, five, six different keywords or different categories or different topics. So users who are searching for sloth sanctuary, obviously it will be like the most relevant.
And if you have different boards in your account, you might want to save first this pin to the board that has the keyword sloth sanctuary in your in the board title and description and then other keywords that are here. they're also coming from the text that is in the description and in the in the description that comes from the site and also from the pin description. So Pinterest understands what this pin is about.
And these are the boards to which you could easily save the spin. And they are pretty broad, different. Some some of them are very broad, like travel or animals.
We don't even see these keywords right here. But Pinterest understands that this pin is related to travel somehow. So you can easily save this pin to the board called Travel and it will be fine.
It will be relevant and it will help you show this pin to a broader audience, not only to people who are searching specifically for sloth sanctuary, but also to people who are searching about any information or travel inspiration. And now let's look at the ranking factor. Number 10, it's the overall user engagement.
That the pin is getting so we're not talking here about the very new pain that you just saved five minutes ago on the platform, because you will not see any engagement yet on it. But when you're doing a search and Pinterest and just look at the search results, very often you will see that the pins that are ranking high, they have a lot of photos in the striated or comments and they have a lot of repins accounts. So this is just one of the examples.
But you might notice this pretty often, that the pins that are ringing high, they have this high user engagement scores in different ways, either it's Repins or all three of them repins comments and photos. So overall, I think that in 2020, Pinterest SEO is getting a little bit more complicated and Pinterest is getting smarter and smarter all the time as a search engine. They are always upgrading and their algorithms and Pinterest is a very interesting search engine even compared to Google, because this platform is so heavily relying on the visual part of the content.
Plus it has all these social factors. Don't forget that you have followers on Pinterest, that you have all this repins, you have photos, you have comments. All of this somehow affects the search results on the platform.
So in this video, I try to make a deep, deep dive in all of this information that I found on Pinterest engineering blog where they share how this Pinterest algorithm works and how their still works and how it compares. They don't speak exactly how it compares to Google. But because I have this background in Google SEO, I understand sometimes what are the similarities and what are the differences between the two platforms.
So it's interesting to read this, but if you find it difficult, I totally understand. But if it's something that you are also interested in reading about and learning about, you can find Pinterest engineering blog on Medium. You can maybe Google this exact search phrase and you will find this blog and you just need to come back from time to time and see what new articles they're publishing.
As I promised at the beginning of this video, you will not leave me today empty handed. If you click on the info, I can in the top right corner, you will find a link there to download my Printables Pinterest SEO checklist for free. Now, Pinterest SEO is really a big topic.
It's big enough for me to have my signature course called Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets. So if you want to dive deeper into all the details of Pinterest SEO and get a step by step plan, then join my course. If there is anything else you would like to ask me about Pinterest SEO today, you can drop me a question in the comments below this video.
And if you found this video useful, then give me a thumb up. Subscribe and hit the Bell button to get notified when my new tutorials go live. Meanwhile, you can check my previous tutorials here and there and I'll see you in the next videos.
