8 Ways To Turn Pinterest into a Traffic-Driving Machine

If you’re looking to boost traffic to your store, this is the post for you!

Pinterest is unique.  It’s more than just a social platform; it is a visual search engine as well. Pinterest themselves refer to their platform as “…a visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.” This is why it’s such a great traffic-driving tool.

As one of the leading traffic-driving platforms for online stores, when optimized, Pinterest can do wonders for bringing shoppers to your online store and boosting sales. To get you started, here are 8 ways you can drive more traffic from your Pinterest boards and posts:

1. Be Strategic With Your Boards

Although it is tempting to have tons of boards that cover an array of topics, in some cases, the more boards you have, the less chances you’ll get someone to ‘follow all.’ Fit Girls is a great example of a merchant getting it right; offering less boards while remaining relevant in their niche.

Additionally, when it comes to naming boards, being too creative is not always the best course of action. Instead, have one main board named after your website and optimize others with relevant keywords. The latter will increase the chances of your content being included in the “Picked for You” feed.

2. Check in With Pinterest Analytics

Check in with analytics to ensure your content is on the right track. These include impressions, demographics and engagement stats that can help you adapt your content-planning strategies. These metrics are particularly important for promoted pins as they help you identify your pins’ performance by the amount of engagement they get versus how many people have seen the content, and allow you to adjust your campaigns where needed in order to increase traffic.

3. Upgrade Your Descriptions  

Your pin descriptions matter in a BIG way.  Each pin description is not only a reflection on your brand, but could deter possible customers if it comes across as spamy or irrelevant. Finding a balance between over-sharing and teasing them to click for more info is extremely important. As a rule of thumb: keep your descriptions short and simple yet informative.

Having said that, the most important description update you can make today, is to ensure that you are using relevant keywords in your pin descriptions — just like Shop Daily Chic has done using the trending search keyword “Fall fashion”.

4. Get Original With Your Content

A large percentage of Pinterest content is made up of repins. So by uploading original content, you will maximize your exposure and stand out from the crowd. Here are some post-creating basics to remember when creating your pins:

• Go vertical. Horizontal images get lost and don’t grab attention.
• Don’t forget to add links to your original content when uploading your pins.
• Use sites like Canva to create visually appealing pins without needing any design know-how. For more design tips, check out our 5 eCommerce Design Tips blog to spice up your site. 

Also ensure that your site has a ‘Pin it’ button, to allow traffic to share your content to Pinterest, thus bringing even more content.

Plus, do you remember that early 2016 algorithm change? It affected the way newsfeeds are populated, making interest-related and informative posts more prominent than hard-sale pins. In other words, you can have the best images in the world, but if they don’t relate to the link or if the link is not sending them to a helpful content or related content, they are less likely to be shown  

5. Know Your Audience and Followers

As with Facebook, which we discussed in our Organic Reach post last week, positioning yourself as an expert in your niche to Pinterest users will go a long way in growing your reach and driving traffic. By using market research and Pinterest analytics to get insight into what resources you can offer your followers to add value, you will increase your post reach and ultimately drive more traffic.

It’s also important to get into the minds of Pinners in general. Here are some interesting facts about the 100 million active users on Pinterest:

Additionally, it’s good to be aware that the amount of followers you have does not necessarily determine how many people you reach.
Pinterest encourages people to follow interests in a big way and therefore by providing content within your niche, you could get more reach through trending topics and category searches and ‘picked for you’ feeds. You can see the amount of people following particular topics or interests by typing: https://www.pinterest.com/explore/(Topic).

6. Join a Popular Niche-Related Group Board

Contributing relevant and informative info to group boards – within your niche – is a great way to get more traffic to your site from Pinterest. You’ll gain access to a large pool of potential customers by adding great content, as well as by engaging with the board followers and posters.

Pin Groupie has a directory for these popular group boards, allowing you to easily search by category. There are three ways you can become a contributor or member to group boards.

These include: 

1. Mingle With Contributors and Founders: Forming a relationship with the contributor can go along way to getting you an invite to the group. You can start by engaging with the contributor – sharing their continent and commenting. Once you have built up a rapport and have more of a networking ‘in’, make contact directly.
2. Check The Board For Invite Instructions: A lot of these groups leave instructions on how you can get invited to contribute in their descriptions. This could include a pin comment or an email.
3. Get Invited By Other Members: Members of boards are able to invite other members. That means if you have a friend or user who is a member of such a group board, they will be able to invite you to join.

7. Optimize for Mobile

Since introducing Buyable Pins, Pinterest has cut back on the number of affiliate links. This affects you particularly on mobile, where hyperlinks do not stand out, and more often than not, are overlooked by users. By optimizing your pins (visuals and descriptions) and your site for smaller mobile screens, you make the whole pin-to-link user experience easier to navigate. When planning and posting your pins, double-check them on a mobile to see how the user will see them.

8. Apply Rich Pins

Rich pins allow for added information to be displayed with the pin, such as a bold title and/or Favicon, which can go a long way in getting noticed and instilling trust in users — enough to click through to your site and share your content, as you can see from the Halloween costumes example below:

This is not the only benefit of rich pins. They also allow meta description – including prices of product and product specs to be posted with every pin — a description that even if a user repins, won’t be able to be edited. . Here’s guideline on how to get rich pins  from Pinterest.

We hope these tips help jumpstart your traffic this week. Be sure to follow our blog for more upcoming traffic boosting tips. Have tips of your own? Let us know your thoughts by commenting below.

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