Five Things You Should Know About Pinterest Traffic

Pinterest traffic is up and Facebook referrals are diving. How are you making changes to your blog promotion? More Pinterest, am I right? [hint…I'm right]

According to a new report by Shareaholic, the percentage of website traffic coming from Facebook has already declined drastically in the second half of 2017. As you can see in the chart below, Facebook’s share of all visits to a sample of 250,000 websites has dropped from 30.9 percent in the second half of 2016 to 18.2 percent in the last six months of 2017. Shareaholic attributes the drop to a number of earlier changes that Facebook made to its news feed last year and to a general change in user behavior on the platform.
You will find more infographics at Statista

Here are five things you should know about getting more Pinterest traffic:

1. Use keywords for search

Pinterest images are important but text counts too. Optimize your pins for search by including industry or niche specific keywords.

Think about your target market and determine what they’re typing in search when looking for your product or service. Now use those in your Pin text areas:

Pin text

• Title
• Description
• Link text
• Board name
• Link alt text
• Image caption
• Page title
• Page meta title
• Page meta description
• Page meta keywords

The key is to use natural language your for your Pinterest descriptions. Tell people what your article is about to inspire them to click through to read it on your blog.

2. Add keywords to Pinterest descriptions

Keyword targeting lets you connect with users searching for specific topics on Pinterest. Choose keywords that align with your content to make the most of this feature. So, if your article is about living room furniture, aim to target users looking up terms like “living room decor” or “home decor ideas.”

A Pin description typically covers the post's 5 Ws— who, what, where, when, and why—of the post. It's an excellent spot to pique the reader's curiosity and include a call-to-action, encouraging them to click a link or save the Pin.

Here are a few ways that keywords can be used:

• Real-time interaction with friends, fans, and influencers
• Reinforce your area of expertise
• Connect with other people interested in the same topic
• Create a social media campaign
• Brand awareness
• Catch the trends – daily, weekly, or holiday
• Find valuable UGC (user-generated content)
• Rock out live events such as conferences
• Build out a social contest

3. Pinterest likes fresh content

Pinterest is amazing for long-term traffic but also right when your Pins are fresh. You'll be rewarded for your efforts NOW AND LATER. You can't say this for any other blog promotion as most social media efforts are dead the same day.

Pinterest brings you traffic NOW and LATER. It's your best bet to spenf time marketing your blog content.

Pinterest shows your Pins in a variety of ways. If you've looked at the Pins below a Pin, these are Related Pins. Pinterest shows fresh Pins prominently in Related Pins, and these can get higher engagement.

From the Pinterest Engineering team, “Related Pins is a feed of content relevant to the closeup Pin and accounts for 40 percent of engagement on Pinterest. With such high usage, these recommendations must be as personal, relevant, and useful as possible. We dug a bit further and found an opportunity to make Related Pins as fresh as possible and ensure newer Pins — seven days old or less — were being shown more prominently when relevant.”

4. Schedule out blog pins over time [and repeat]

Adding one Pin to Pinterest for your blog post isn't as effective as adding multiple Pins to different Pinterest Boards. It just makes sense that more Pins would gather more RePins, right? You can add variety with different images or graphics, test other descriptions, or even use different hashtags.

Pinterest uses Pixie, a flexible, graph-based system for making personalized recommendations in real time. Pixie now powers recommendations across Pinterest in Related Pins, home feed, and Explore and accounts for about half of all Pins saved.

More Pins, more Pinterest traffic.

5. Inspire Pinterest traffic with calls to action

Use action words in your description to inspire a repin or click through to your blog.

A few examples:

• Pin this for later
• Read the article here
• Click through for the full tutorial
• Register for email
• Sign up now
• Grab your checklist on the site
• Don't miss the full article here

I hope this gives you many ideas to increase your blog content to gain more Pinterest traffic. Get to work now, and more people will visit your website now and later.