Finding the best keywords for Pinterest to optimize your account is an essential part of success with Pinterest SEO. With the right keywords in your pins, boards, and profile, you can more easily grow your blog traffic and successfully implement a Pinterest marketing strategy.
Pinterest is a great source of keyword ideas thanks to their advertising tools that include a keyword research tool and Guided Search. Pinterest provides a lot of insight into how and what people are searching for on the platform to help you find the best Pinterest keywords.
I love using Pinterest's keyword tools to help me better optimize my clients' Pinterest accounts as part of my Pinterest Management Services.
Here’s how to grab all the keywords from Pinterest’s Guided Search and Pinterest Keyword Research and use them to create new content ideas and optimize your account.
How to Use the Pinterest Keyword Tool
The best way to find the keywords most searched on Pinterest is to use Pinterest’s advertising keyword research tool.
With Pinterest’s keyword tool, you can easily discover the most popular pinterest searches in your niche and relevant keywords to use to optimize your Pinterest account. Best part? It’s very easy to use and it’s free!
Need proof that keywords help? I increased my traffic by 346% by optimizing my Pinterest profile with keywords.
How to Get to the Pinterest Keyword Tool
The basic process of how to do Pinterest keyword research centers on the keyword volume tool available in the Pinterest Advertising platform. It can be hard to find this free Pinterest keyword tool because it’s hidden inside the Pinterest advertising platform. But don’t worry—you don’t need to advertise on Pinterest to use their keyword volume and research tools.
To start doing keyword research for Pinterest, you must have a business account set up first. You can only access the Ads tab if you have a business account! You can quickly create a new business account for Pinterest or convert your personal account to a business account with Pinterest’s step-by-step instructions.
You can access the Pinterest keyword research tool by going to your Business Hub and clicking the Ads tab at the top of the page. Then click on the Create Ads.
This will take you to the Promoted Pin creation page to create a Pinterest ad campaign. Don’t worry, we’re not going to create a campaign—we just want to get to the keyword research tool.
Select Traffic as your campaign type and then click continue to get to the next page.
On the next page, scroll down until you see the Keywords window. This is where you can start doing keyword research for your Pinterest account. It’s the best Pinterest keyword tool because it comes directly from Pinterest!
How to Do Pinterest Keyword Research
The Pinterest Ads keyword research tool is very easy to use. You can follow these steps:
- Put your main search term into the search bar.
- See what ideas Pinterest shows you, including search volume.
- Save the ideas by clicking the + button and creating a list.
- When you’ve gathered all your ideas, you can copy the list and save it into a document for reference.
Pinterest shows keywords based on relevancy, not just keywords that are the same words or variations on the words you search. For instance, you’ll probably discover a lot of additional ideas when searching for your main keywords that can help guide you to create new content or new boards that Pinterest sees as related and relevant to your niche.
You’ll also see Pinterest keyword volume, which can help you discover which keywords are the most popular.
Doing keyword research on Pinterest is as easy as plugging in ideas into the search field and creating a list of terms. But the key to keep in mind? When you add a keyword to your list creator in Pinterest Ads, you lose the keyword volume.
If you’re trying to create a prioritized list of the most important keywords for your Pinterest account, making sure you preserve keyword volumes is the key. It can be a total pain, however, to copy and paste keyword ideas with volume into a separate sheet so lots of people overlook this when doing keyword research.
How to Use Pinterest Guided Search to Find Keyword Ideas
Pinterest’s guides, or the boxes up at the top of Pinterest search results, help Pinterest users navigate interests and explore ideas topically. The other advantage to using these guides for keyword ideas is they change dynamically based on user engagement with the highest trending and engaging guides at the forefront of the guide list.
Pinterest’s guided search is probably the best Pinterest keyword generator out there because it gives you additional insights into how people browse and discover new topics and ideas from Pinterest search terms. You can go beyond Pinterest’s keyword search tool used for advertising and generate hundreds of ideas for new content and ways to optimize your website and Pinterest account.
To use Guided Search to find new keyword ideas, follow these steps:
- Type in your main search idea into Pinterest search on a desktop computer and pull up the results page.
- Below the search bar, click just in front of the first guide box and drag down while holding the mouse button down. You’ll select the entire list this way.
- Copy the list and paste it into a text editor. As a tip, paste as plain text if you can to prevent the images being copied over too.
- Now you have an entirely new list of keyword ideas in order of engagement and popularity according to Pinterest!
Keep in mind that these change depending on user gender and location and might change based on individual preferences too, based on what Pinterest has stated on their engineering blog. Your audience might see different keywords at the top of Guided Search but this is definitely a start on the right path!
Using this method can also help you circle back to Pinterest’s advertising tools to find additional topics and keywords to cover in your account.
How to Use Keywords on Pinterest
After you’re done gathering Pinterest keyword search ideas, it’s time to actually incorporate those keywords into your Pinterest strategy. This is part of Pinterest SEO and can be the more tricky part of getting keyword optimization on Pinterest right.
I have a full guide on how to add keywords to Pinterest pins and your profile to help you better understand how to optimize your profile with the keywords you found in your research. But to give you a quick overview, you should use keywords in the following places in your account:
- Your business name
- Your profile
- Board Titles
- Board Descriptions
- Pin Descriptions (including hashtags!)
- Image File Names
- Body copy in the post
- Pin URL of the post
One key that most people overlook is using the keywords in their content and URL! Similar to Google, Pinterest cares about your on-page content and if it’s relevant to your pins and to your audience’s searches.
You can combine your Pinterest keyword research with regular ol’ SEO research with Google Keyword Planner for the biggest positive effect on your rankings. My Pinterest Management clients who do a combined Pinterest & Google search approach benefit from getting the most traffic from the two most popular search engines on the internet by optimizing once for two platforms!
But don’t stop there, there are other ways you can use your Pinterest keyword research! Try these:
- Create new Pinterest boards around these topic areas to gain traction on Pinterest
- Choose better categories for your boards
- Optimize old pins for new keywords
- Repin old content with new keywords in the description
- Create new content for your blog, podcast, video, newsletter, and social media channels
- Review old content in the keyword niche and rewrite to include any new keywords if necessary
Keyword research doesn’t stop and needs to be done routinely, as interests and search volumes change over time. While Pinterest doesn’t reveal how often they update their search volume numbers, I recommend looking at new keywords at least once per quarter and redoing your keyword target lists on a routine basis.
Next Steps for Success on Pinterest
I hope these techniques help you find more SEO keyword ideas from Pinterest and use a tool for SEO you’ve never thought of using before! Keyword research on Pinterest is really quick and easy and using Pinterest’s own tools.
I use this same process as a Pinterest Manager to maintain keyword lists for my clients and use those keywords to optimize their accounts. Want to learn more? Be sure to check out my Pinterest SEO guide to learn more about how to use keywords and optimize your Pinterest account.