In this guest post, Jack Potaczala of Call2Pin, one of Europe’s first Pinterest-focused marketing agency, describes what factors are most important to consider when optimizing your Pinterest boards for search.
Soon, Pinterest SEO is going to be as important as SEO for Google or other search engines. Because of this, my Pinterest marketing company, Call2Pin, decided it was important to answer to the question, “what are the main factors that are considered for Pinterest’s search engine to index and display its search results?” In today’s article, we want to explore what factors are most important to Pinterest when deciding the boards that appear in search. This research was based on the campaign conducted for Lingerose.com, a lingerie wholesale site. To conduct this research, we searched for the term, “lingerie wholesale”. Choosing the more precise searched query, for research purposes, gives us greater possibilities to see exactly what really works.
Ok, let’s start from the beginning – when (or, rather, how fast) would our board be indexed by Pinterest’s search engine?
This answer depends on a few factors. The most important being the strength of our account and the level of our pinning activity. Pinterest sets the frequency that its crawls our account based on those factors. So it’s simple: the more followers we have, the more often our Pins are repinned by others, and the more active we are, the more often our account will be crawled by Pinterest.
These are the search results from March 15th, 2013:
It took about 3 – 4 days for the boards to be indexed by Pinterest for the query “Lingerie Wholesale”. As you can see, Pinterest only indexed the boards that included our search term in their titles. The other boards from our customer’s Pinterest account (for example “Axami Wholesale”) weren’t indexed, despite the fact that the boards contained many Pins with “Lingerie Wholesale” in their description.
So, for the first time, we noticed that the exact keywords used in the name of a board are a very important factor for Pinterest’s search engine.
To learn the extent of these factors, I decided to do a very precise analysis. Below, I will present the results gathered during the two days of testing done in April 2013. The first will show my hypothesis, and the second one will confirm it.
On April 9th, 2013 I checked what Pinterest’s boards were displayed when searching for the term, “lingerie wholesale”.
These are first 12 results displayed:
In the first position we find the board “Lingerie Wholesale”, with Axami’s board, “Axami Lingerie Wholesale”, coming in second. The third board is “Lingerie Wholesale – new products”, in spite of the fact that it has more Pins than the previous board. In fact, “Lingerie Wholesale – new products” has about 50 more Pins than Axami’s board, but about 30 Pins were just added, so there wasn’t a chance for Pinterest to include them in their crawl. However, we can clearly see that it’s only a matter of time before the new Pins will be indexed by Pinterest. If I’m right, in a few days “Lingerie Wholesale – new products” board will be higher than Axami’s board.
The next boards are “Obsessive Lingerie Wholesale” and “Plus Size Lingerie wholesale”. “Obsessive Lingerie Wholesale” has 16 fewer Pins, but “Plus Size Lingerie wholesale” hasn’t added new Pins in 12 weeks. Pinterest could have considered my board, “Obsessive Lingerie Wholesale” as “fresher” than its opponent, or the order could have been based solely on the number of followers.
The next set of 6 boards show that the order by Pinterest is based the number of Pins within a Board.
What about the next 12 results (positions 13-24)?
The first 6 results (positions 13-18) are in a similar situation as the one described above, since the number of Pins decided their order. However, there is one exception. The board called “Sexy Lingerie Wholesale” appeared in recent search results with 92 Pins, and 52 of the Pins were added the day before the query. Meaning, the day before the search the board only had around 40 Pins. This increase in Pins gave the board a position between “Nipllex Lingerie Wholesale” board, with 53 Pins, and “Tessoro Lingerie Wholesale” board, with 36 Pins. If my hypothesis is correct, then “Sexy Lingerie Wholesale” board should be higher than “Anais Lingerie Wholesale” board after adding 81 Pins over the next few days.
When I checked the results the next day, the “Sexy Lingerie Wholesale” board overtook “Anais Lingerie Wholesale” board. So, as I expected, it’s the number of Pins that played the main role for these boards.
For positions 19-24, the result was the same situation- no exceptions.
Once again – I want to highlight that in my research, it was the number of Pins that was the most important factor when a board’s name matches to the search query.
To confirm my thesis, I checked the situation 2 weeks later and received the following results (compared to those gathered on the 9th of April 2013). As you can see in the table below, there are not many changes. Almost all of the first 24 results are in the same positions as before for the “lingerie wholesale” query.
You may notice that the order of the boards displayed depends on the number of Pins. The more Pins a board has, the higher the position it can reach. However, there are some exceptions.
Let’s start from boards in the second and third places. Both of them belong to our account:
- 2. “Sexy Lingerie Wholesale” – 192 Pins
- 3. “Lingerie Wholesale – New Products!!!” – 260 Pins
Obviously, “New products…” has more pins. As you can see, this was also true the last time we searched “Lingerie Wholesale”.
So, what could be the explanation for this situation? The most probable one is that it’s due to the boards’ title. Both names include the “lingerie wholesale” keywords, but “Sexy Lingerie Wholesale” seems to be a more accurate result for the query.
- “Sexy Lingerie Wholesale” contains 3 words – 2 of them are our keywords
- “Lingerie Wholesale – New Products!!!” – contains 4 words. 2 of them are our keywords, plus 3 special characters.
Ok, let’s leave these two boards and go on to positions 20, 21, 22 and 23.
- 20 – “Lingerie Wholesale” – 14 Pins
- 21 – “Sexy Teddy Lingerie Wholesale” 27 Pins
- 22 – “Teddy Lingerie Wholesale” – 19 Pins
- 23 – “Gorsenia Lingerie Wholesale” – 15 Pins
As we see, the board “Lingerie Wholesale” is higher than the other 3 boards with more Pins. Again, I think it’s due to the accuracy of the board’s name. “Lingerie wholesale” is and exact match to the searched term.
About the author:
Jack Potaczala is the founder of Call2Pin.com – one of the first European marketing agencies focused on Pinterest only. Loves creating and implementing new fresh ideas. Started his e-commerce adventure in 2006. Graduated in 2008 writing the thesis “The development of e-commerce market”. During his first and very successful Pinterest’s campaign discovered a huge Pinterest’s impact on Google search results. From that moment he devoted himself to his new passion – Pinterest campaign and Pinterest’s SEO field. Published his research in the “Pinterest’s SEO and impact on Google – for advanced” book.
Contact Jack on Linkedin
