As a powerful search engine and a popular social media platform, Pinterest offers immense opportunities for bloggers and content creators to drive traffic, expand their audience, and ultimately make money. In this article, I will share five powerful research methods to find Pinterest keywords and bonus tips for organizing and using the keywords discovered using those techniques.
Contents
- Blogging for Money: Content and Web Traffic
- Increase Blog Traffic
- Why Pinterest?
- Why is Pinterest Keywords Important?
- How To Do Pinterest Keyword Research?
- Where To Put Pinterest Keywords?
- Bonus Tips: How to Organize Pinterest Keywords Efficiently?
As beginner bloggers, even if monetization is our ultimate goal, it’s almost inevitable that we have to deal with a brutal truth: blogging is NOT a quick money scheme. As a powerful search engine and a popular social media platform, Pinterest offers immense opportunities for bloggers and content creators to drive traffic, expand their audience, and ultimately monetize their efforts. In this article, we will explore the significance of Pinterest keywords and how they can play a crucial role in boosting your blog’s visibility, engagement, and success on this dynamic platform.
Some bloggers out there may have claimed that they started to make money blogging within a month or even faster. That may be the case for them, but I highly doubt that it’s a common phenomenon.
For most content creators who are not celebrities, in the first few months (at least!), a likelier scenario is that almost nobody reads our posts or watches our videos.
It’s like basking on the street, but no one stops by to listen to us. Yet, to finally get an audience, we still have to keep singing as if we’re singing in a full-house concert.
If we stop and give up, we’ll never get any audience.
Blogging for Money: Content and Web Traffic
We need to set realistic short-term goals to keep us going in the long run until we finally find our audience.
It is to avoid disappointment when our (unrealistic) expectations are not met.
Let’s be pragmatic. Before we can actually monetize, let’s focus on what we can do and should do first.
In the first few months, we should focus on enriching our blog content and finding ways to increase web traffic. These are the two essential aspects of monetizing our blogs.
Increase Blog Traffic
As far as the topic of growing blog traffic is concerned, there are many suggestions. Again, there are too many that we, the beginners who have a limited budget to spend on our blogs and may have to do all the work on our own, may feel overwhelmed.
That’s why when I made a plan to start a blog, I decided to focus my time and energy on SEO and Pinterest as my main strategies to drive traffic to my blog.
It’s generally estimated that SEO efforts will take, on average, 6 to 12 months to see the results.
How to blog consistently with little visibility for 6 to 12 months? It’s challenging, if not tormenting.
For this reason, besides SEO, I need other strategies. And Pinterest is my primary choice.
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Why Pinterest?
But why Pinterest?
I prefer Pinterest over popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc, for the following reasons.
First, Pinterest is more a search engine than a social media platform. This means that the content you post on Pinterest has a much much longer lifespan than posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.
In fact, a search for a certain topic or keyword on Pinterest often generates results that lead us to blog posts published a few years ago. While it’s possible that people create new pins for their old content, it’s also possible that those are pins that have been around for quite a while. Old pins are still visible after several years, and it’s likely that their visibility and popularity have been growing over time.
Second, with 463 million people using Pinterest every month, Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms, giving me opportunities to reach a vast audience.
Third, Pinterest’s board system helps in organizing and categorizing content, which can improve the chances of my content being found in search engines.
Fourth, data shows that 83% of Pinterest users have completed a purchase influenced by the content they saw on Pinterest. So for bloggers who aspire to make money through affiliate marketing, Pinterest is a platform that must not be overlooked.
The last reason is purely personal. I’ve tried to cut down my usage of social media for a few months now (Facebook in particular because I’ve never been active on other social media). So if there’re other ways, I’d avoid resorting to social media first.
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Why is Pinterest Keywords Important?
Keywords play a vital role in driving more traffic to a blog through Pinterest. As you probably have known already, Pinterest is a search engine. Therefore, Pinners often conduct searches to find inspiration, ideas, or products. Including well-researched keywords will help our pins rank higher in these search results.
Additionally, using popular keywords helps tap into trending topics, increasing the likelihood of content going viral. Viral pins have the potential to reach a vast audience, leading to a significant boost in traffic and potentially attracting new followers.
Furthermore, Pinterest’s Smart Feed algorithm rewards high-quality and engaging content. Using relevant keywords can help us increase the engagement rates and subsequently, exposure and traffic to our blogs.
How To Do Pinterest Keyword Research?
In this section, I’m going to show you several ways to effectively conduct keyword research on Pinterest, without using any paid tools.
Method 1: Pinterest Search Bar
Probably the most common and straightforward method. On the Pinterest Business Hub page, when you click the magnifier icon on top of the page, a gray search bar will appear. Simply type in a general search word or term, but do not click “enter.” You’ll see a list of suggested/related search terms, including some long-tail keywords, and Pinterest profiles that have the same or related words in their profile name.
In my example, by typing “blogging” in the search bar, I found 5 other related keywords.
Method 2: Pinterest Keyword Bubbles
Also on the same page, if I hit the “enter” button to conduct the search, besides pins related to the search term “blogging,” we will also see a row of colorful keyword bubbles under the search bar showing a number of related keywords.
Clicking those keyword bubbles will lead to more keywords.
For example, clicking the “how to start a” bubble generates more keyword bubbles. In this way, we’ve found a list of long-tail keywords related to the topic “blogging”:
- How to start a blog
- How to start a blog for beginners
- How to start a blog and make money
- How to start a blog for beginners free
- How to start a blog in 2023
- How to start a blog for free
- How to start a blog for beginners step by step
- How to start a blog for beginners ideas
Method 3: Related Searches
If you scroll down, you’ll find several grayed-out boxes somewhere further down the page, as shown in the picture below. Here you’ll see several more related keywords.
Method 4: Pinterest Trends
On the Pinterest Business Hub page, click the “Analytics” button on the top left and select “Trends” from the drop-down list. It will lead us to the Pinterest Trends page.
Scroll down and you’ll see the word “Keywords” on the left sidebar. Click the arrow in the box and a search box will appear.
When I type “blogging” in the search bar, it shows me the trends of “blogging for beginners.”
Clicking “blogging for beginners” takes me to the page shown below. On that page, I can type other keywords to compare the trends.
Scrolling down a little, we’ll see several gray bubbles showing related keywords. We may click these bubbles to compare how these keywords trend on Pinterest.
Method 5: Pinterest Explorer
When I came across this Pinterest Keyword research technique (and a couple of other techniques) on Leah Marie Marketing, they simply blew my mind!
I had read quite a lot concerning this topic, but no one talked about these ingenious and hidden tactics.
Let’s dive in!
Leah recommends searching in an incognito mode when employing this method. I believe that it’s to generate neutral results, as opposed to search results influenced by our previous browser activity data.
So open a new incognito window and go to the Pinterest Explorer page.
Do not log in. Instead, type a general keyword in the search bar. Similar to the Pinterest search bar method, a list of related keywords and profiles will appear if you do not hit “enter” right away.
When I hit “enter,” the search results show a number of popular pins.
Click on any of the pins, and you’ll see a string of gray keyword bubbles under the profile of the pin creator. Click the arrow sign at the right end, and you’ll find more related keywords.
Not only that, scroll down the page, and you’ll find more strings of keyword bubbles all over the page.
In addition to those small gray keyword bubbles, similar to Method #3, if you scroll further down the page, you will see grayed-out boxes containing more related keywords.
Leah has a few other genius ideas about how to find keywords on Pinterest, head over to her blog to find out more. For me, I’ve gathered a ton of keywords using these 5 techniques.
Where To Put Pinterest Keywords?
How should we use the keywords we’ve found on Pinterest for optimization and traffic generation?
It’s recommended to add keywords in the following 9 places as the best practice of Pinterest SEO:
- Pinterest Profile
- Board Titles
- Board Descriptions
- Pin Titles
- Pin Descriptions
- Texts Overlay on Pin Images
- File Names of Your Pins
- Meta Descriptions of Your Blog Posts
- Alt Texts of Pin Images
Nevertheless, avoid keyword stuffing. Rumor has it that search engines are not fond of the behavior. We don’t want to get penalized for committing the offense.
Bonus Tips: How to Organize Pinterest Keywords Efficiently?
So we know how to find keywords on Pinterest, in fact, a large amount of keywords. For example, by using the above methods, I found 150 keywords related to “journaling.” And my research is far from exhaustive.
But the keywords we found are not organized. They are messy. To put them into use effectively, we need to organize them into categories, which can be quite a headache.
Fortunately, now we can seek help from artificial intelligence.
So this is how I organized my keywords. First, I opened a new spreadsheet on Google Drive (you may use Excel if you like to). I keyed in all the keywords I found in the spreadsheet.
When I found enough keywords, I copied those keywords to Chat GPT and asked it to group the keywords into different categories. With its powerful data analysis capability, it completed the categorization in a blink of an eye.
In addition, I also asked Chat GPT to draft pin titles and pin descriptions using the keywords I found. Although I may not necessarily like its writing, those texts are good starting points and references. I will then edit or mix and match to add more humanity, authenticity, and uniqueness to the titles and descriptions.
Check out and save the diagram below for Chat GPT prompts that you can use to organize and use your Pinterest keywords. ⤵️
I hope this guide has shed light on the importance of Pinterest keywords and how they can elevate your blog’s performance on the platform. Now, it’s your turn! I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with utilizing Pinterest keywords. Have you seen significant improvements in your traffic and engagement? Do you have any additional tips or techniques to share? Leave your valuable insights in the comments section below, and let’s continue the conversation.