Are you using Pinterest to market your pet industry business? Pinterest is full of pet lovers looking to find ideas on how to do more with their pets. It’s up to you to create the content they’re searching for. Ultimately, Pinterest is a search engine! So all the effort you put into search engine optimization for your website can extend to your Pinterest strategy. In fact, the best way to use Pinterest as a pet business is to approach it with an SEO mindset!
There are over 300 million Pinterest users. So even if you have a location-specific pet industry business, the odds are that there are plenty of pet lovers in your city who are already using Pinterest. In fact, “Pampered Pets” is one of the top 100 trending topics of 2020 on Pinterest! Search volume is up for searches about outdoor cat playgrounds, pet memorials, dog cakes, pet fashion and more!
Don’t you want your pet brand in front of people who are searching for things like that? Of course, you do! When used strategically, Pinterest can become one of the top traffic sources for your website.
Below are 3 ways you can optimize your Pinterest account so pet parents can discover your pins and click through to your website.
1. Update Your Bio with Pet Industry Terms
One of the quickest ways to improve your presence on Pinterest is to edit your name and bio. They should include keywords about your pet industry business. If your business is a local service like pet sitting or dog training, you should include the name of your city or service area in your bio. What if you have a personal brand? If people associate your name with your business, I recommend you include your name in your bio, too.
Consider what kinds of words people might search for to find your business and use those words in your name and bio.
Unsure words you should use? Find what search terms people use to discover your website and see if those terms can fit in your bio on Pinterest. You can use a free tool like Moz Keyword Explorer to do this research.
Bonus tip: Once you find out what search terms lead to your website, you’ll have some great clues to the kind of content you should be pinning to Pinterest. If someone is googling a term to find your website, there’s a good chance someone is searching for that same term on Pinterest! So take note of these search terms and hold on to them for later!
2. Use Clear Titles for Your Pinterest Boards
Back in the day when I started using Pinterest for my own personal searches, I had tons of boards with silly names like “Nom, Nom, Nom” or “Quotes I Live By”. It’s fine to title boards like that for your own personal use. But if you’re using Pinterest to market your pet business, you should set those personal boards to “secret” and optimize the titles of your business boards.
Good board titles are clear and descriptive. This isn’t the place to get creative and whimsical! For example, instead of something like “Doggy Nomz” you should use “Dog Treat Recipes".
If you’re able to get more specific, that’s even better! Maybe you have “Vegan Dog Treat Recipes”, “No Bake Dog Treat Recipes” and “Pumpkin Dog Treat Recipes” filled with pins specific to those categories.
You should also have one board that’s dedicated to only pins from your own website. Title that board with your business name and include a keyword or two if your business name doesn’t include them. For example, this might be “Designs by Roo Dog Bandanas”.
3. Pin From Your Own Website as Much As Possible
One of the greatest things about Pinterest is that it gives priority to content that comes from your own website. That’s not the case with Facebook or Instagram. Those social networks are strategically designed to keep people in their apps and not clicking out.
Pinterest wants to help its users get ideas and learn how to do new things. They actually want their users to click on your pins and go to your website!
Take a look at these stats about the number of impressions pins from different sources will get on your own account:
Pin from another website: 1x the number of impressions
Pin from your own website: 40x the number of impressions
That’s why you want to pin the majority of your pins from your own website. But don’t freak out that you need to write 100 new blog posts to get 100 new pins! That’s not the case at all. I recommend that you have 8-10 pins per blog post. So if you’ve been publishing 1 blog post per month this year, you should have 10 pieces of content that you can drive traffic to from Pinterest. Create 10 pins for each of those 10 blog posts and voila… you have 100 pins from your own website!
Do you want to learn more about what those pins should look like and how to schedule them to post at the best times? Join the Masterclass: Pinterest for Petpreneurs here to learn more and enroll!
Author Bio:
Over the past 10 years, Tori Mistick has built the award-winning dog lifestyle blog and multi-media platform, Wear Wag Repeat. Her expertise in social media engagement is the key to the success of her blog, online store, pet industry podcast and e-courses. With a community of over 70,000 dog moms, Tori is passionate about teaching other women in the pet industry how to grow their businesses online.
Blog: wearwagrepeat.com Podcast: wearwagrepeat.com/podcast Dog Mom Instagram: www.instagram.com/tmistick
Petpreneur Instagram: www.instagram.com/wearwagrepeat Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/tmistick
