Most people are on Pinterest for a reason. You are probably there in the hopes of creating brand awareness and boosting your business. This means sending traffic back to your website or blog. What is the best way to do this? What is a simple way to let Google and other search engines send you lots of targeted, relevant, free traffic?
The answer lies in writing your pin descriptions in a very specific way.
First off, make sure your descriptions are long enough. One study that looked at thousands of pin descriptions shows descriptions with 200 to 300 characters were the most repinnable. You should also use very specific words and phrases to convey your message.
(To give you some kind of idea how long 200 to 300 characters are, the previous paragraph has a 263 character count.)
Your description should be full of keywords, phrases and terminology that relate to the business, market or niche you are in. If your blog or website is all about underwater basket weaving, you should use the phrase “underwater basket weaving” and any relevant phrases and keywords in your pin descriptions. This tells Pinterest and web search engines exactly what the focus of your website is, improves your search engine ranking for those terms, and helps drive traffic.
It should go without saying, but you should include a link in every description. If someone finds an image interesting enough to stop and read the description, they are engaged in what you have to say. Give them a call to action, a link to the related blog or website. Clicking on a Pinterest image expands that image, and then clicking on it again sends you to the webpage related to that image. Don’t make someone go to all that trouble to get your website. Include a link to your website in your description to make things easier for them.
We mentioned a link as a call to action. That brings up a very important point. Your descriptions should all include some call to action. People want to know what you expect of them. Tell them exactly what you want them to do, then make it easy for them to do it. Asking ‘Please Repin’ or ‘Please Like’ is simply done, and you may be surprised at how much this simple tactic can increase engagement.
Use hashtags. The humble # (hashtag) added before a keyword or phrase you want to get ranked for in Pinterest and search engines works wonders to that effect. This is one way that Pinterest’s search engine understands what a particular pin is about. Combine the hashtag with important keywords and phrases relevant to your business and the traffic Pinterest sends to your site is “warm”, receptive and laser-targeted.
