It’s one of the biggest issues people face when they start using Pinterest – how to increase the Pinterest traffic they’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Whether you get the clicks will depend on the amount of effort you’re putting in and the type of content that you’re sharing, but when you spend hours making and saving pins not to see the results to your website, it can be incredibly disheartening.

How do you carry on? Where do you find the inspiration and motivation to continue using a platform which isn’t giving you back the results you crave?

Well one of the simplest ways is to build up your knowledge of how Pinterest works and don’t assume it’s just another social media tool.

It’s not.

It’s very much a search engine as many of you will know, and as such needs to be treated quite differently.

You need to think like a pinner. You need to put yourself in their shoes and understand what they are looking for. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be more than half of the way to succeeding in pleasing the organic pinner and growing your traffic.

5 Ways to Grow Your Pinterest Traffic

So let’s look at some ways that you can easily grow your traffic and ensure you’re maximising the time you spend on Pinterest.

You might be doing some of these things already or you may not be following them through completely. They may even not be on your radar yet.

They are some simple wins that you can do every time you are on Pinterest to ensure you give yourself the best chance of building your traffic from the platform to your website or blog.

#1 Inconsistency of Pinning

I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll say it again. Pinterest loves it when you pin consistently. Like any platform using an algorithm, it rewards those that appear regularly and use it in an organic, natural way.

Don’t try to fudge it and don’t try to fake it, just use it regularly every day and keep your activity non-spammy. It doesn’t even have to be for long, just a few minutes here and there, but just be present day after day and you’ll see the benefits.

Now this is where the use of a scheduler comes in. Spending an hour a week scheduling all your pins to be saved across a 24/7 period means you never have to remember this rule again; it just becomes automatic.

#2 Undersharing Your Pins

I see content creators doing this time and time again and it’s one of the biggest reasons why they don’t see the traffic they want coming back to their website.

They undershare their pins.

What do I mean by that?

Well, they spend a lot of time creating blog posts and/or pins for their website pages only to share them ONCE to one board on their Pinterest account.

Then, they never share it again.

Ideally, you need to saving your pins to multiple boards on your account, at least 5-6 and then ensure that it’s reshared (don’t repin from within Pinterest though) at regular intervals.

Make that content and pin really work for you. Give it maximum exposure. Give it the best chance of being found in search and clicked as much as it deserves to be.

#3 Lack of Keywords

Every description you put out on your pins must include some solid keywords.

Remember how I said Pinterest is search engine? This means that you need to feed it the right set of parameters to help your pin get found in search.

If a pinner is looking for ‘healthy vegan snack’ ideas in the search bar then your pin for a Cauliflower Popcorn recipe needs to have that search term in the description.

Similarly, your pin leading back to your range of contemporary wall art needs to have that term written into the description. There’s no point simply saying how lovely it is; no one will be searching for that.

This is why we need to put ourselves in the shoes of the regular pinner. Understand what they’re looking for, what help they need, what answers they’re searching for and deliver up the content and descriptions they want.

#4 Too Many ‘Other’ Pins

I mentioned in point 2 that many people tend to undershare their pins. Well it’s also the case that they tend to share too many pins from other people.

Let me explain further.

If you’re sharing 20 pins per day, at least 16 of them need to lead back to your website. Only 4 of them should be from other people.

It’s the 80:20 rule. Share 80% of your own pins to 20% of other people’s.

It’s not spammy, it’s exactly as Pinterest recommend. The more you share, the more chances you have of being seen as a good pinner and being found in search results.

So if you’re sharing more than 20% of other people’s pin it’s time to cut that back. Make sure that around 80% of the pins you save are yours, from your website or blog.

I guarantee this will increase your traffic very quickly.

#5 Ignoring Your Statistics

This is one of those areas where there’s a lot of contention right now and I intend to write a more detailed post on this very topic, but essentially most people don’t review their statistics often enough, or read them correctly.

What do you need to be looking at from within your stats?

Well firstly, you need to make sure you look at Google Analytics over anything else, particularly your Pinterest Analytics.

GA is the ONLY place that will give you the definitive statistic you’re looking for and that’s how many clicks you received to your website from Pinterest in a certain time period.

Plus, it will tell you exactly which pin sent you the traffic and when.

If you’re not sure how to get this information the best place to look is:

Acquisition -> Social -> Network Referrals.

Click on Pinterest and you’ll see the landing pages which have received the most traffic, from where you can find the associated pins.

So, these are just 5 ways you can improve your Pinterest traffic. And a few of them are quick wins too, so good luck improving your clicks, and let me know how you get on.

Jen x