How To Optimise Your Pins for the Pinterest Smart Feed

Smart feed is the somewhat mysterious Pinterest Algorithm which determines which pins gets shown in a users feed. It looks at the quality of your pin, the quality of the website or blog that the pin leads to (source quality) and the magic mystery element which is a rating assigned by Pinterest.

So now the smart feed content generator determines which pins are best for the smart feed based on the pin itself and how other pins from the same source (website or blog) have performed historically. This all boils down to the best pins being shown first not necessarily the newest pins which is a great result for pinners pinning high quality pins with relevant content (try saying that 10 times fast!!).

So how can you optimise your pins and increase your likelihood of being shown in the feeds of your audience? I’ve detailed 14 rules to follow when designing your pins and writing your pin descriptions

7 Top Tips for Designing your Pin

1) Pin sizes: Pinterest is shifting away from the very long pins and seems to prefer 600:900px and they should be in a ratio of 2:3 (width:height)

2) Vertical pins are best

3) The pin should tell a story

4) Engaging content that invites pinners to click through to your high quality website or blog

5) Use high quality professional images, website such as Unsplash, Canva and StockSnap have a brilliant library that you can use

6) Use text overlay but do not overwhelm the pin with too much text – balance is key

7) You should discreetly brand your pins with your logo

How to Write Converting Pin Descriptions in 7 Steps:

Having designed a killer high converting pin, you need to optimise the description to make it as easy as possible for Pinterest to work out that your pin in relevant and should be shown to your audience when they search for certain terms.

1) Put your most key message and most important keywords in the first 65-75 characters of the pin description as only these characters will show under your pin in the feed. The rest of the pin description will be shown when a pinner clicks on the pin for a close up

2) Include relevant keywords in your pin description. Make these user friendly

3) Pinterest are making continual changes to the smart feed and are starting to penalise keyword stuffing i.e. just cramming in as many keywords as possible in a nonsensical stream

4) Just as you tell a story with your pin, you should tell a story in your pin description, make it interesting and engaging for the reader (think speed dating but through pin descriptions!! How can you make the reader interested in a very short space of time but be mysterious enough that you encourage them to click through)

5) You should use a call to action (ideally not too in your face, a small easy action for them to take), words such as click, shop, listen, join are useful. What call to action can you use to lead them to your content?

6) Make it clear what the benefits are for your audience if they engage with your content, what will they get, learn, understand, solve?

7) Include hashtags that are relevant to your content at the end of your pin descriptions

Key Take Aways

You will be able to do this in your sleep after a few months of creating content, in the meantime I would recommend using these pointers as a checklist to go through when you create a pin.

The main point to remember when putting together your pins is Pinterest wants to encourage you to create content that inspires pinners and also encourages people to explore the content further by repinning and following the links.

Also as with any content that you create for your business, whether courses, social media posts, pins, tweets, blog posts, emails or whatever else always think about:

1) What does my audience want to learn about and how?

2) What is my goal in writing this content? What do I want my audience to do once they have read it?

What’s Next?

Ready to Profit from Pinterest? then you should definitely check out my ultimate Pinterest guide.

This free (and highly detailed) cheat sheet gives you my exact 6 step process to attract more leads & make more sales for FREE using Pinterest.

I’m Ready to profit from pinterest