How to Rank First on Pinterest

Pinterest for Bloggers

You can rank high on Pinterest in three ways: through Pin ranking, board ranking, and profile ranking.

Let’s walk through all three options to achieve a high ranking:

Pins

A Pin is ranked at the top when it is viral and matches the searched keywords.

Profiles

In addition to keyword matching, a Pinterest profile is ranked at top when you manage to build a trusted, popular, and well-established account.

Boards

To ensure that your board is ranked at the top, you need to optimize these three factors:

Keyword matching
Number of followers
Number of Pins in the board

Assuming that all the Pins on your board are on topic, there are four main scenarios you encounter when you try to optimize the ranking of your board:

Your board has a low number of relevant Pins and your profile has a low number of followers.
Your board has a low number of relevant Pins and your profile has a high number of followers.
Your board has a high number of relevant Pins and your profile has a low number of followers.
Your board has a high number of relevant Pins and your profile has a high number of followers.

While it takes time to grow your Pinterest followers, there are a few things you can do to rank your board at the top even when your subscriber numbers are low (scenarios A and C). This includes removing all the Pins that are not on topic, adding more topic-related Pins, using a better board name, and optimizing the board by adding the correct keywords.

When your board has a high number of followers (scenarios B and D), it can take less time to rank the board at the top.

Common reasons for boards not being ranked at top may be: incorrect board name, use of too competitive (general) keywords, board keywords are not optimized, board contains unrelated Pins, board has a very low number of Pins, too few followers.

While optimizing my board on Pinterest I have noticed the following:

Even when you have fewer than 3,000 followers, your board can be ranked at the top, if you use popular but not competitive keywords and optimize your board.
The order of the keywords matters because Pinterest shows that best matches first.
Avoid marking your board with signs – especially at the beginning of the board name. I used to mark all my boards with an “!” sign in the beginning of the board so I could find them faster. When I delete that sign, my organic traffic doubled.
When ranking your boards on very popular keywords, the number of followers matters.

How to ensure that your boards are ranked at the top of Pinterest search results?

Follow these principles to optimize your board ranking

Popular but not competitive board names – Try to find the most popular keywords that are related to your blog niche that have less competition (which means that fewer bloggers use them).

Your goal is to create boards that cover popular topics with high monthly search volumes and fewer competitors.

You need to find that gap where you can be ranked at the top with a popular keyword that is used by fewer bloggers.

Don’t stuff keywords – This strategy doesn’t work and it might hurt your ranking.
Board names should consist of up to four words.
When naming boards – use the exact keywords since Pinterest shows that best matches first.
Board descriptions – Place the keyword at the beginning of the description. Write short descriptions of 1-3 sentences. The board description can contain synonyms.
The more relevant Pins in a board, the higher the board will be ranked. If your boards are filled with pins that are not relevant, delete them.
In popular keyword ranking, the number of your Pinterest followers matters. You can see this when you search for popular keywords on Pinterest, such as baby, pregnancy, recipes, etc. You will notice that most of the top-ranked profiles are the profiles with the largest followings.

Choose your board strategy

After you have organized your Pinterest boards, it is time to implement Board Strategy No. 1 (Step 8) and Board Strategy No. 2 (Step 20).

How to know which board strategy you should start with?

Start with the Boards Strategy no. 1 if you just started your Pinterest account, or you have fewer than 3,000 Pinterest followers.

When should you move on to Board Strategy no. 2?

While pinning to group boards has a very positive impact on small Pinterest profiles, by moving to Board Strategy no. 2 you will be leaving behind most of the low performing group boards that prevent the advanced profiles from getting bigger exposure.

Therefore, if you have implemented Strategy no. 1 for at least 6 months and you have at least 3,000 followers – move on to Board Strategy no. 2.