You should be using Pinterest for SEO (search engine optimization) for your company. Now, unless you’re in the weeds on SEO activation, you probably think I’ve lost my mind. But we’re on the third sentence here, people. Hang in there a second!
We know Pinterest is a highly visual social network that is popular as its own search engine, has neat e-commerce connections that other social networks don’t have, can drive traffic to our website and product pages and, (until now we thought) depending on our target audience and product, was a good place for us to be. The perception has always been that Pinterest is mostly women and great for fashion, beauty, decor and lifestyle brands with highly visual products for that reason.
B2B Companies use Pinterest for SEO
WireCrafters is a manufacturing company that makes woven and welded wire partitions. Think huge shelves and security cages in big warehouses (among other applications). I got to know them recently when I spoke at a meeting of their distributors about social media marketing.
What WireCrafters knows that I want you to learn is Pinterest gives you a quick, easy place to add inbound links from a credible, third-party website where you have some control over the title tags and other code search engines study and attribute to your site. It’s like do-it-yourself link building.
When you combine your own activity there with a few like-minded people who will follow your boards, like your pins and perhaps even share them, click through and the like, then you get inbound traffic and additional signals to tell Google, Bing and Yahoo that the website on the other end of those links is a valuable resource.
Don’t believe me? Look at this inbound link comparison chart from a tool called AHrefs:
See that? It looks at Facebook inbound links, Pinterest inbound links and pulls them out as important along with domain qualifications and domain rating. (This is a comparison of Indian Motorcycles and Harley Davidson, by the way. Neither are clients. I just picked them to have something to show. Can you guess which is which? Who has their SEO game going? Drop your choice in the comments.)
Pinterest for SEO doesn’t have to mean Pinning all day
WireCrafters — and your business — doesn’t need a bazillion followers on Pinterest for the social network to work for them. Certainly, the more they have, the merrier because more clicks, shares and favorites there are more signals to “vote” for the image and its related content with the search engine algorithms. They do know, however, as you now do, that Pinterest gives them a place to generate valuable inbound links and signals that tell the engines your website should rank for the keywords you wish to.
So, Pinterest is for women, retail, fashion? What about backhoes, metalwork fabrication, construction scaffolding? Need to ship supplies out of the United Kingdom on a container ship? Pinterest may help.
And I’m sure my pals at WireCrafters would love it if you need to take a look at some TA-50 military storage lockers, a security entrance gate for a manufacturing plant or RackBack safety panels like NAPA uses at one of its distribution centers.
To rank well in search and achieve SEO, you need high-quality inbound links. Using Pinterest for SEO can achieve that. You can actually control the seeding of them and through the image descriptions include the RIGHT keywords and tags rather than depending on third party websites to get it right for you. You also need traffic. Participating on Pinterest for SEO purposes at least gives you a chance at connecting with like-minded and interested folks and getting some click-throughs. If you aren’t there, you don’t have that chance.
Using Pinterest for SEO may fall high or low on your list of priorities depending on your product, audience, resources and more. But it’s high time we made sure it was on the list somewhere. Because even if we think it’s nonsense, Google doesn’t.
Is your company on Pinterest? Drop a link in the comments and tell us how you use it, what you’re getting out of it and what you’re going to do next to make it better!