10 Ways To Optimize Pinterest Images

Pinterest can be a very large source of traffic to your business website.  I am working with a few clients at the moment where Pinterest is their 3rd highest referrer of traffic after Google and Facebook.  Pinterest shouldn’t be ignored especially if your target market is women.

 

 

It is interesting to note these recent statistics showing user demographics of Pinterest:

• Pinterest has an average of 1.36 million users daily;
• 68.2% of users are female;
• 50% of users have children:
• A large percentage of pinners are aged between 18 and 44;
• 28% of users have a combined family income over $100,000.

Does your ideal client or customer fall into the above categories?  If yes, then you need to strongly consider adding Pinterest to your social media marketing strategy.

If you haven’t set up a profile yet,  see more details here on establishing a Pinterest business account.

Once you have your Pinterest account set up you want to ensure that your images are optimised so that you obtain the most benefit.  Here is our top 10 tips:

1. Set up your board names with relevant keywords to your business/industry.  The board title is used in the pinterest URL for the board so the keyword should be chosen carefully.
2. The file name of your image becomes the image title on Pinterest.  So ensure the file name is descriptive and containing a keyword.  For example “chocolate-cake” is much better then “img256”.
3. Ensure your images are visually appealing and attractive.  Images shown on Pinterest are 554 px wide and anything wider will be resized to this width so take advantage of the size available.  There is no limit on the vertical length of an image so it can be as long as you choose, however I recommend limiting it to 5000px so that users don’t have to scroll down to the see the entire image.  If they do have to scroll down, they may not return to the top of the image to repin it.
4. Make your images appealing and relevant so that users are compelled to repin, like and comment.  More engagement will mean more followers and more followers means more users are seeing your content.
5. Ensure you are using Pinterest as a social platform and not just promoting yourself.  Engage with other pinners by commenting and re-pinning other images.  Also pin from other websites to offer a variety of content to your followers.
6. When you upload an image direct to Pinterest (rather then pinning from a website) ensure that you edit the image and include a link to the URL that it relates to.  This will then mean if someone clicks on the image within Pinterest they will be directed to the website to which it relates, hence driving more traffic to your website.
7. Descriptions on images can be up to 500 characters long however, I strongly suggest not using a description this long.  Pinners are attracted to Pinterest for the visual images and not the text.  So make your description short with a great caption and using your main keyword.  If you want to add more information you can include it in a comment at the bottom of the image.
8.  Add the “follow” and “pin it” Pinterest buttons to your website.  Ensure every page has a relevant good quality image that can be used to Pin and ensure the image is optimised so that when someone does pin it to Pinterest you are receiving maximum exposure.  You want the title and description to be keyword rich.  Whenever that image is re-pinned the title and link remains with the link so the mare shareable the image is, the more traffic you will receive to your website.
9. If YouTube and videos are part of your marketing strategy, you can also pin your videos to Pinterest which will link to the video.  You can see what video’s look like pinned on our Webonize TV Pinterest board.  The play button is automatically placed on the pinned video and Pinterest users can view the video right there within Pinterest.
10. Unlike Facebook, Pinterest allows Google and other search engines to crawl their site so many boards are appearing in Search Results.  Another reason to ensure you are using keywords in all areas of your pinning on Pinterest.

One extra tip, if you are a retail business or selling items, when you pin an image to Pinterest add the price with a “$” sign in the description.  This will then add the dollar amount to the top left corner of your image and makes users aware that the item is for sale.  Once again, ensure the link is included in the link section of the image so that when the image is clicked the user is re-directed to your website and the page relevant to that product so that they can purchase.

Most importantly, have some fun with it, but be careful.  It is very easy to get hooked and spend too many hours scrolling through the wonderful images and finds on Pinterest.

I would love for you to drop by and follow me on Pinterest and let me know in the comments below if you have started using Pinterest and how you have found it is working as part of your online marketing strategy.