Improve Your Pinterest Business Strategy- Board Optimization – Part 2 of 8 (Video)

In case you missed it, check out the first video in this series which was about Pinterest account level optimization. My first Pinterest optimization video was about setting up your Pinterest business account for success. This post is about optimizing your Pinterest boards, and video three is about optimizing Pins. There will be eight videos in all.

Pinterest users browse the social media channel and save Pins to organize ideas and plan future purchases. Although the majority of Pins are from businesses, there is still plenty of opportunity to reach out to shoppers who are interested in your products or services and looking to buy.

If you want to increase your followers, raise brand awareness, and start making sales using Pinterest, you’ll need to optimize and organize your boards so they can be found in searches both on and off Pinterest. That means using the data you found in keyword research to optimize boards with information people search for.

When we talk about optimizing our Pinterest boards and Pins for search, we should try to get the most out of our efforts by optimizing for text and image search on Pinterest. But with a little extra effort, we can optimize for Google searches too.

Before we dive in, let’s make sure your Pinterest is visible to search engines.

If you’re someone who used your Pinterest as a personal account and converted it to a business account, this is a setting you need to check to make sure it’s set correctly. You definitely don’t want to hide your Pinterest Pins from Google and miss out on additional engagement with that can come from Google searches. Enabling this setting lets search engines like Google find your Pinterest Pins.

To make sure Google can find your Pinterest:

Open Pinterst and go to edit profile
Go to and privacy and data
Uncheck the box next to Hide your profile from search engines (Ex. Google)

Now you’re letting your marketing efforts do double duty on Google and Pinterest. I’ll talk more about search engine optimization in video number eight.

Pinterest Board Level Optimization

For each of your boards, make sure that the text area at the top of each board is filled out. Use as much of the text area as you can without keyword stuffing. Describe what the board is about and be sure to use your keyword or keyword phrase.

Next, make sure all Pins on each board relates to the keyword chosen for that board.

The topic for the board is a keyword or keyword phrase chosen by keyword research and planning our Pinterest marketing strategy. Each board should contain Pins that are thematically cohesive with this topic. That means, on a board about Pinterest tutorials, I want all the Pins on that board to only be about tutorials. You don’t want any Pins about other social media channels. Don’t save Pins to this board that are about any other topic.

Name the board for a keyword or keyword phrase. Do your keyword research and plan your strategy. That sets the URL of the board to match your keyword.

Unlike the Pins on a board, the boards on an account don’t need to all be related to keywords. In other words, it’s okay to have a board on an account that’s there for fun or to show personality. On my Pinterest, I have a board with horoscopes and then another with crafts. If you’ve used your Pinterest as a personal account, don’t delete boards. There is no harm done unless you have reached the maximum number of boards and need space.

Users can have up to 500 boards. You are not penalized for having too many. With the ability to have 500 boards, you have room to add boards to show promotions, seasons, as well as user generated content. So, go ahead and create boards and add Pins that are fun or show personality for your business.

Arranging Pinterest Boards

The order of boards on your account doesn’t matter. Move boards to the top of your account to appeal to human readers. The order of the boards makes no difference to the Pinterest algorithm. People visiting your profile page will see the boards at the top first. You can easily drag and drop your Pinterest boards to bring attention to your most important boards.

Remember your Pinterest boards can show up in Google searches when you optimize the images and text.

When you save a Pin, you have options for what size thumbnail to use. Pinterest Pins should use vertical thumbnails. The vertical aspect ratio helps them get more engagement in the Pinterest newsfeed. Vertical Pins get more attention.

We’ll cover more about images in the next post and video – Part 3.