A secret Pinterest tool to boost performance

Yo Content Goblins! If you’re new to Traffic Alchemy, I talk about my experiments with monetizing and driving traffic to my websites. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with Pinterest content to drive traffic and monetizing the traffic using display ads from Journey.

I recently found this super cool tool that can help optimize your Pinterest performance.

How PinClick Changed My Pinterest Workflow

One thing to remember about Pinterest is that it’s a search engine at its core. The difference from Google is that Pinterest focuses on image content. It uses the image, title, description, alt-text, and your website content to determine what your Pin is about.

You might say that Pinterest is slightly less sophisticated than Google. To optimize Pins for Pinterest, we need to take a slightly different approach from what we use for SEO.

Pinterest also uses annotations to identify the topics that pins are related to. These are likely machine and human-generated. Knowing these official annotations is critical to driving impressions on Pinterest.

The only tool I know of to do this is Pinclicks.

How I Use Pin Clicks to Optimize My Pins

The primary function I use in PinClicks is the annotation tool. You can search for a topic that you want to post about. I usually find these topics using the Pinterest trends tool.

I found that “back to school hairstyles” is starting to trend. This makes sense, given that kids are about to return to school and want to make a good impression on the first day.

I dropped this topic in to the PinClicks top pins tool and then sorted by highest saves. This gives us an idea of the best performing Pins.

The tool shows you each pin and the stats related to that pin. I first look at the pin pictures for the ones that are related to my topic. I note the style of the pin. Is it a plain image, does it feature text over the image, what colors do they use, etc.

Then, the most powerful part is the ability to click on the pin and see the annotations I mentioned earlier.

Pay attention to the Annotated Interest section. These are the topics that Pinterest thinks this Pin is related to. When users search for these terms, this Pin will likely appear.

Sure enough our Pin is displayed in the search results. I had to do some scrolling, but that’s OK. The order of Pins will be different for different search terms.

How I Use the Annotations

I’ll dive deeper into this in a future blog post, but including these annotations is a very powerful signal to Pinterest.

I use these terms in the pin title, description, and within the content on my website. I believe Pinterest uses all of these as signals to determine what the Pin is about.

This is an easy way to increase the likelihood that your pin will appear for these terms.

Leverage ChatGPT to Generate Descriptions

Drop the terms into ChatGPT and have it generate your pin descriptions using the related annotations.

Here’s an example of the prompt I used. I only asked it to bold the terms so you can see where they are used.

Prompt:

Output:

I bolded the terms so you can see where they are used.

You can then copy the description and use it when creating your pin. If you have multiple pins you can ask ChatGPT to produce multiple. Just change the prompt to “Generate 10 Pinterest Pin Descriptions for …“ or whatever number you want. ChatGPT is great for this.

Protip: I often enter these terms into PinGenerator and let it generate descriptions using them too.

That’s it for today. I can go deeper into this topic in the future, but this will give you an idea of how a tool like PinClicks can really supercharge your Pinterest traffic.

- John “Content Goblin” Ward

This email contains affiliate links. I make a small commission if you purchase using one of these links. I only recommend products I really use or like.