Pin To Win Baby

How to Increase Your Traffic using Pinterest

A Gray Hop Guide

We raise our hands. It wasn’t until the past year or two that we’ve paid a huge amount of interest to Pinterest. A platform we both used to primarily find inspiration and pin bathroom renovation ideas, unaware of the huge levels of traffic that can be enjoyed if you know what you’re doing. So, we started to pay attention, and results came flooding in. As the nice people we are, we’re here to share the knowledge so you too can reap the rewards of Pinterest!

So, let’s get started shall we. Here’s how to increase your website traffic using the power of Pinterest…

Clean-up your account

If you’re serious about Pinterest, the first step is to clean-up your account. Archive old boards that cling onto recipes you’ll never use (let’s face it) and pretty summer dresses. Create a set of new boards, if you’re a home improvements company these should reflect your product offering, but also inspiration too. Start with around 8-10 boards.

Get to grips with SEO

We’ve said it before approx. 100 times, and we’ll say it again, Pinterest is a search engine not a social network. SEO applies, and in order for your pins and your account to be found you need to take this into account. Understand your keywords and begin by optimising your bio and then your board descriptions. When pinning, SEO is a huge factor!

Verify your website

It’s also advised that you verify your website, which is fairly easy to do. You’ll need to switch to a Pinterest Business account first and then head to your blogs Yoast plugin. From here head to the ‘social’ section, here you’ll see a tab for Pinterest and a box for a slither of HTML which you can grab from Pinterest once hitting the ‘verify’ button. 

Create beautiful Pins

There’s a lot that goes into a pin that isn’t just a pretty picture, but it’s a good place to start. It’s worth going that extra mile and spending the time to create attention-grabbing aesthetically pleasing Pins. We usually use Canva to design free and inspiring pins, and if you’re stuck on amazing images then you can look to resources such as Canva for royalty-free photography. 

Optimise your Pin

You want your pin to be found, after-all you need the views to convert to traffic. Try to strike a balance between writing for SEO and writing for the user. You want your title and description to contain keywords but you also want it to be eye-catching and inviting for the user. For example, is your Pin regarding vegan restaurants in London? Instead of ‘vegan restaurants in London’ you might want to go for something such as:

5 Amazing Vegan Restaurants in London You NEED to try! 

Numbers do well on Pinterest, so it’s something to think about when you’re writing up amazing new content. 

Schedule your pins 

Pinterest loves fresh content, so give the people what they want. Pinterest can feel daunting to begin with, especially when you read advice from the experts who pin 60 pins a day. Yikes! This is where scheduling apps can come in handy, Tailwind might just be your new best friend. This app will suggest the best times to pin each day and help you to keep on track. If you want to enjoy some serious traffic from the platform, we’d recommend aiming for between 10 and 12 pins a day. Test out different formats and designs to see which earn you the best results. 

Join Tailwind tribes

As well as scheduling your pins, Tailwind also gives you the ability to join what are known as tribes. These essentially let you find other Pinners in your own niche and join their ‘tribe’ this allows you post your own content to the tribe, repin other people’s content and help each other grow. It’s a good way to get more exposure for your pins but we generally have varying levels of success with tribes and you might find you’re doing just fine without them. 

Share your content and others

There’s a general 80/20 rule when it comes to Pinterest but you’ll find what’s best for you and it might differ to this. If you want to drive traffic to your website then you need to be pinning a lot of your own content, but break it up by pinning other great content from users, this should also help to increase your monthly unique viewers. 

Analyse and edit

The great thing about all digital marketing is the analytics available, and the same can be said for Pinterest. Using a combination of the Pinterest analytics and your Google analytics, you’ll be able to determine your best performing pins and your worst. It’s also useful to look at how long users from Pinterest are spending on your website. If one of your pins is starting to gain momentum and traffic, if people are bouncing off after 10 seconds you might want to consider lengthening your blog post and making irt a little more user friendly to encourage a longer stay. 

Stay patient

Unfortunately, as with all digital marketing elements you won’t see success overnight. Growing your Pinterest account and generating traffic does take time, so be patient. The key to success is remaining consistent, so don’t give up if you’re not seeing results after a few weeks of Pinning. It will get there, but it takes time.