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Pinterest is a search engine. Your goal is to show up in your ideal customer’s search results. To do this, you need to know what your ideal customer is searching for. Always start by identifying who that ideal customer is. If you haven’t done that yet grab your worksheet here. Once you have your ideal customer, think of the topics of your pins and boards, and come up with some words or phrases your customer would use if they were looking for them. Let’s look at an example: Say I am creating a board to showcase ideas for the perfect horse property. I’m going to go to the Pinterest search bar and start typing as you see in the image below. Pinterest suggests commonly searched terms that go along with your subject. Write those down (or save them in a spreadsheet if you are super organized) and go on to search a few more terms to get a few more ideas.
Repeat this process for all of your boards. By the time you finish, you should have 3-5 keywords for every one of your Pinterest boards. Then think about the content you have on your website and try to think up and research about 20-30 more keywords that will be just for your pin descriptions.
Sorry, but you are not quite done yet. Pinterest also allows you to use hashtags in your Pin descriptions. Follow the same process as you did for your keyword research and find 20-30 hashtags that you can use when you pin your blog posts to your boards.
This is a LOT of Keywords!
I know. It’s a lot of work, and it will probably take you an entire afternoon to get it done. If you are like me and like to do things one time in big blocks set aside an afternoon and get it done. If you like to do things a little bit at a time, just set a goal to find 3-5 keywords every day until you finish.
The magic of having a pre-built list of keywords is that you don’t have to waste time doing keyword research when you want to manage your Pinterest account quickly. When you make a new board, you can refer to the list and select 1 for the title and 3-5 others to use in the description.
When you create pins from your domain, you can snag the list and create a description that includes at least 3 of those keywords and plop 3-5 hashtags at the end. Pins that feature hashtags show up chronologically (the newest first), so it does not do you any good to go back and add hashtags to old pins, but you should add hashtags to new ones.
