Last week I wrote about the growth of Pinterest and how it can be used by businesses in the construction industry. The article proved to be very popular so I decided to approach it from another angle and specifically look at the SEO benefits. If you decide to create an account and start using Pinterest, it’s also a good idea to add Pinterest buttons to your website (yes, ANOTHER button). Since social signals are becoming increasingly important for ranking positions, encouraging your audience to pin and share your images/videos can only help increase your online visibility. To add these buttons to your site visit: http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/
1. Driving traffic
The main reason Pinterest has been making headlines over the last few weeks is because of the vast amounts of traffic it’s driving. Pinterest can bring new visitors to your site that might not have come across you or your products and services before. At the moment, I don’t think much of that traffic is targeted or quality traffic but this might change as Pinterest comes out of beta and more people from your target audience group sign up. Below you can see that within about a week, Pinterest is already in the top 5 traffic referring sources to our site.
Referral traffic report
When marketing to architects, imagery is very important so product manufacturers can make use of this to showcase their products and different product applications. Running competitions that encourage visitors to use your products in different ways can help promote your content online. Take a look at McKay Flooring once again who are currently running a Pinterest competition, where users have to design their own magical home or private study using at least one of their products and stating why they like that particular product or design. This can help generate buzz about the company and their products.
2. Keyword strategy
Your website and blog should be optimised to focus on a few core keywords and phrases that are relevant to your industry and the audience you’re targeting. Individual Pinterest accounts, as well as each pin board you create is being indexed by Google. Therefore make sure you give them descriptive titles containing your keywords. So, a Pinboard called ‘ 5000L rainwater harvesting tanks ‘ packed full of product images and descriptions, would be better than a board simply called ‘Our tanks’ which is generic and non-specific. The Pinterest search feature still needs some tweaking but I’m sure it will improve over the months to come and you want users to find your boards when they type keywords and phrases into the search box.
3. Link building
Pinterest is quickly becoming a huge network and generating loads of traffic so the site’s domain authority is great. Search engines are constantly indexing all the new content and the more people post your items on their boards or link to it, the more followed links you’ll be getting, helping with search rankings. Include links to your blog and website on your boards and tag individual pins with hashtags (#) which, like Twitter, are searchable. Remember that if someone ‘pins’ something off your site, you also get a followed link. The two images below illustrate this.
Using hashtags to categorise pins
Link back to your website
4. Image search
The main focus of Pinterest is imagery and lots of it. Whether you upload product pictures, case studies, infographics, posters, architecture snaps or videos – all of them have a stored link making it easy to come back to the original pin even of others have shared it on their profile. Link the photo you’re pinning to a specific and relevant URL on your site where people can find out more information. Make sure your images are name correctly and use ALT tags to make your images searchable in Google. Take another look at your website, blog, portfolio and see what ‘pinnable’ content you have that would be interesting to your audience.
5. Detailed reporting in analytics
When you look at your traffic sources report in analytics, Pinterest actually tells you which piece of content generated the referral click and allows you to click through and see that item. Other social sites, like Facebook, simply show you a referral path so you’re not completely sure what post someone clicked on to get back to your site or blog. This feature makes it easy to identify what pins and pinboards people are engaging with the most (likes, comments, repins), what is driving quality traffic back to your website/blog and then focus on interacting with these people and producing more of that type of content.
Pinterest lets you view which exact pin or pinboard sent traffic back to your site
Have you got any other points to add to this list? If you’re on Pinterest, have you seen any results yet?
We have set up a profile so come and follow our Pauley Creative pins!
