How to Use Pinterest for SEO

Pinterest has been a dark horse competitor in the social media platforms for some time. With 70 million users, 71% of which are women, 28 percent of which have a household income of 100K+, Pinterest is a customer magnet for certain companies. Although it does tend to attract people with money to spend, businesses have had a hard time leveraging this particular social network. But the opportunity is there for the taking if you can make sense of the data.

Set Up a Verified Business Account

Most Pinterest analytics aren’t available unless you have this specific type of account. If you haven’t already, switch your existing profile to a business account and get verified. Once you have done so, you can access the analytics in the top right of your Pinterest dashboard.

Understand the Limits of Pinterest Analytics

Once you have access to the analytics, you’ll want to take a look at what it tracks, and what it doesn’t.

The metrics Pinterest tracks includes:

Most Repinned
Most Recent Pins
Most Clicked
Pins (images pinned from your site)
Pinners (how many people pin images from your site)
Repins and Repinners (which pins from your site get repinned, and how many people do so)
Impressions (how often your pins are shown on Pinterest, for instance during a search)
Visitors (how many people arrived at your site via Pinterest)

What you’ll notice is that these metrics ONLY focus on the images from your website. Images from other sources aren’t tracked. Likewise, activity on your boards isn’t tracked. If you repin an image on your board, subsequent activity on that image isn’t tracked in metrics since it originated on a repin.

Once that minor issue is internalized, you may find that this methodology reduces the amount of “noise” in your data. Sure, it’s a little hard to track how much engagement your non-site pins get. But they also aren’t as important to your strategy as the pins from your site. They might be a low-grade indicator of brand engagement, but ultimately what you’ll want to track is sales. And for that you need to see what gets people onto your website.

Track User Activity on Your Website

You’ll want to use Google Analytics to monitor user activity once they arrive at your site. How long do they stay? How many pages do they visit? What do they buy? What are the cart abandonment rates?

Even though the analytics that Pinterest provides can seem a little slim, you’ll probably find that the smaller feature set makes it easier to interpret, especially when used in conjunction with a conversion optimized site and Google Analytics. Before you know it, you’ll be killing it on Pinterest and leaving your competitors in the dust.