If you’re not using Pinterest to drive traffic to your website, boost lead magnets, level up email marketing, and promote your brand…it’s time to start! Pinterest is definitely still a great place to store ALL of the ideas and inspiration, but it’s also where people are hanging out and searching for new ideas, tools, and tips for their brands and businesses. And you could be the one showing up in their search results! 🥂
The key to a strong Pinterest strategy for your brand all starts with blogging. And, it just so happens that WordPress is the best blogging platform out there! This post is all about bringing WordPress and Pinterest together and how to optimize your blog for Pinterst. I’ll cover the nitty gritty details of everything from formatting to tech specs to how to actually post your WordPress blogs to Pinterst in the easiest way possible. Let’s dive in!
How Pinterest works
By now, Pinterest has been around a long time! You’re probably already familiar with using it to find, save, and organize all kinds of graphics and links from around the internet. However, over the last few years, Pinterest has gradually evolved from a digital inspiration board and social network into a unique visual search engine.
Just like people find your website and blog through Google searches, once your content has been Pinned, it’s discoverable by searching for related keywords. But unlike Google, Pinterest displays a smart feed of curated content to users every time they log in.
In other words, if your content aligns with a user’s Pinterest habits, they don’t even have to search for your content to see it. It could just show up in their feed. That’s a huge benefit you can’t get from Google!
Bringing WordPress and Pinterest together
Pinterest and blogs are a match made in heaven! You’ve already done the hard work of creating long-form pillar content on your blog and optimizing each post for SEO. Creating pins from each blog means you can expand your audience reach on an entirely different platform and drive more organic traffic to your website.
How to optimize your blog for Pinterest
At first, it can feel a liiiiitle overwhelming to add Pinterest into the mix! After all, you’re adding a brand presence to a whole platform! However, it really doesn’t have to be super difficult or take up a ton of your time and energy. With the right plugins and know-how, there are plenty of shortcuts that make pinning a breeze! Here are some steps you can take to optimize your blog posts for Pinterest and make it easier to pin your latest posts.
Register with Pinterest Business
Whenever you open a Pinterest account, it will default to being a private account. The very first thing you should do to optimize your blog for Pinterest is switch your account to a business account. This will give you access to Pinterest’s analytics tools, so you can search for keywords and tap into Pinterest analytics.
Claim your website URL
Speaking of analytics, claiming your website on Pinterest allows for you to collect stats on the pins you publish for your site as well as pins that other people create from your site. You’ll also get access to additional pinning tools that are only available to businesses.
Plus, you’ll get a fabulous check mark that tells everyone your account is verified, which builds brand know, like, and trust. The process of verifying your domain is a little tech-y, but WordPress has an amazing tutorial that will walk you through every step.
Optimize your blog posts
If you don’t already have some eye-catching and pinnable images in your blog, then it’s time to add them to old blog posts and make a plan for any new posts! You can work with a designer or Pinterest manager to create brand-aligned pins. If you’d rather DIY, Styled Stock Society has some fabulous tempaltes! You can also create pin images with Canva or Tailwind.
Create a few templates that match your branding, and rotate through them for each post! According to Pinterest, pin images should be:
- Vertical
- 2:3 aspect ratio (1000 x 1500 pixels is preferred)
- High-quality images
- Bright
- Easily readable
- Branded with your logo or URL
Start Pinning
Now, pin the graphics you’ve made to your Pinterest account! Whenever you make a pin, Pinterest will auto-populate the title and description with information from your blog. In general, this description will be ready to go, but double-check to make sure everything looks correct and that your target keywords are included. Just like keywords help you show up in Google search results, they help people find your pins!
Important note! Always make sure that a pin links back to your website. That way, when people click on your pin, they’ll be directed back to your original blog post.
Is there a Pinterest plugin for WordPress?
Yes! And it makes the whole process of pinning your blogs SO much easier. My Pinterest plugin of choice is Tasty Pins. Trying to optimize your content for both Google and Pinterest at the same time can be tricky (and time consuming!), because they have separate algorithms that work slightly differently.
Tasty Pins makes it easy to optimize your site images for Google and Pinterst at the same time (which is a huge time and headache saver!) It also helps you do other super-helpful stuff, like setting a default image for pins or disabling any images you don’t want to end up on Pinterest. You can even hide additional pinnable images from your blog page, but make them available exclusively for creating pins.
How do I post my WordPress blog to Pinterest?
There are a couple of ways to get your blog from WordPress to Pinterest. The first is to manually pin an image, just like you would pin anything else! But if you want to put things on autopilot, you can post new blogs to Pinterest automatically with RSS feeds.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format of your content that makes it possible for blog posts to be pulled into other places. Most blogging platforms (including WordPress!) have a built-in RSS feed that automatically updates whenever you publish a post.
This option is only available if you’ve claimed your website on Pinterest! If you haven’t done that yet, head back to the top of this post and follow those steps. If you’ve done that step and you’re good to go, here’s how to post your blogs to Pinterest via RSS feed:
- Log into your account.
- Click the menu in the top right corner and find Settings.
- Click Create Bulk Pins in the menu on the left.
- In the Auto-publish section, paste your RSS feed URL. (It will be your URL, followed by “/rss”)
- Choose which board you’d like to publish pins to.
- Click Save.
How to Automatically post your blog posts to Pinterest
Reading Pinterest analytics
Diving into the analytics behind your pins can help you understand which kinds of pins are performing well and how many people click through to your website. You can find the link to your account’s analytics data in the Pinterest menu. Here’s the main analytics data you’ll see:
- Impressions (how many times your pin has been on someone’s screen)
- Total Audience (how many individual users have seen your pins)
- Saves (how many times your pins have been saved to someone’s board)
- Engagement (every time someone clicks or saves your pins)
- Outbound Clicks (how many people clicked through to your website)
What about the WordPress Pinterest tag?
If you want to delve into Pinterest ads, then you’ll want to place a Pinterest tag on your site. A Pinterest tag is a small piece of code that you can add to your website. Once it’s there, Pinterest will be able to track visitors to your site and the actions they take after seeing your Pinterest ad. Ultimately, it lets you measure the effectiveness of any ads you place on Pinterest.
That said, you don’t need a WordPress Pinterest tag to post content to Pinterest! You can easily do that manually or by connecting Pinterest to your RSS feed. Just scroll back up to see the details in the “How do I post my WordPress blog to Pinterest?” section above!
Ready to start pinning your WordPress blogs to Pinterest?
I hope this blog has helped you understand how to optimize your blog for Pinterest! Pinning your blogs is a fabulous way to drive even more organic traffic to your website and generate leads.
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