Pinterest SEO Made Simple: How to Unlock Massive Growth in 2025

Pinterest is yet again undergoing some big changes, and if you feel like you can’t keep up with it all, don’t worry.

This article summarizes the main things you need to know about Pinterest SEO to succeed in 2025 and beyond.

As a Pinterest manager, and also business owner, I spent over a decade perfecting the best strategies to rank on Pinterest, bypassing the hacks and shortcuts and focusing on the stuff that actually delivers results.

I won’t be telling you about how to go viral or fastest way to make money, but what I will teach you is the fundamentals = to get any traction on Pinterest, you need to nail the basis, and that’s Pinterest SEO.

Let’s dive into it!

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How Content Discovery Works on Pinterest

Before we dive into Pinterest SEO, you need to understand how content discovery works.

Pinterest is a platform where people come to look for ideas, so Pinterest needs to get really good at filtering billions of pins and showing the most engaging and relevant ones to the users.

To do that, they use a variety of ranking signals and machine learning process, to make this content discovery as fast and as accurate as possible.

There are three main places where you can discover new content:

In the home feed based on your interest and the accounts you follow
In the related pins recommendations
In the search bar

A few years ago Pinterest also had a follower tab, where you can only see content from the accounts you follow, but that has now been integrated into your home feed.

For that reason, having a high number of followers is not very important for your account growth, as they are just a small part of the overall audience.

The key to growth on Pinterest is helping the algorithm to make this content discovery very easy and fast – and we do that by using keywords in the places where the algorithm looks for them.

So we are helping the algorithm do its job by giving hints and clues that will allow it to scan and categorize our content much faster.

SEO is the key ingredient here, but much of the growth is also powered by engagement on the content, which I have covered in a separate article here.

What is Pinterest SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the backbone of content discovery on Pinterest, as I already mentioned earlier.

In simple terms, Pinterest SEO means using keywords and interests to optimize your content, so that the algorithm can understand and serve it faster, and to the correct audience.

I use both keywords and interests for SEO optimization, and here is what they are:

Keywords are phrases or words that users type into the search bar to look for specific content on the platform.

Interests are a categorization system on Pinterest – so interests are used to categories different types of keywords into logical hierarchy. They are not the same as keywords, but a lot of interests also exist as individual keywords.

In fall 2024, Pinterest finally added search volume for different interests to the platform, so you can now see how popular different topics are, by navigating to the interest page and checking the volumes there.

You can also use a tool like Pin Clicks or Pin Inspector which allow you to search interest volumes in seconds.

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How is Pinterest and Google SEO Different?

Optimizing for Pinterest SEO is not the same as optimizing for Google SEO, and I wanted to highlight some key differences before we go further.

What they have in common is the fact that both search engines use keywords to understand intent and content.

But on Pinterest, you can also target interests, which helps the content to get discovered much faster, as you’re just following the natural content hierarchy designed by Pinterest itself.

The type of keywords used on Pinterest is often very different from those used on Google—users tend to look for more aspirational, broader, and long-term keywords rather than short-term, very specific actionable advice.

Pinterest doesn’t care about domain authority (age or number of backlinks) or page authority as much as standard search engines.

On Pinterest, saves are the most important metric for determining how users like your content, while on Google, there are a mix of different ranking signals, and nobody really knows what they are.

Best of all, Pinterest loves fresh content, and you can get new pins ranking within one month.

In Google, you will have to accumulate some authority and backlinks before you get out of the sandbox and get some traffic.

The most important point is that the information on how the Pinterest algorithm works is publicly documented and available for anyone to read, so it’s not some secret that a content creator has figured out.

In contrast, nobody knows for sure what the most important ranking factors in Google are, and we will never find out.

How Pinterest Ranks Your Content

Pinterest uses a variety of different machine learning models to help generate what they call candidates for the pins, which they run through a ranking system to generate relevant content for the specific user.

The most significant shift in the algorithm came in 2014, when they introduced the ‘smart home feed’, which no longer ranks pins based on chronological order but on quality, so that why posting times are not important and you need to focus on saves.

I won’t go into all of the technical details from the papers, the main thing you need to remember that in 2025 and beyond, Pinterest loves fresh content, and rewards accounts with high engagement = high saves.

So forget about chasing vanity metrics like followers or monthly views, and focus on what matters: creating fresh pins which drive engagement on your account.

How to Use Pinterest SEO in 2025

Here is an overview of how to implement an effective Pinterest SEO strategy for your account.

Get organized
Keyword research
Account optimization
Board optimization
Pin optimization
Posting schedule

1. Get Organized

You should have a sheet where you record all your keywords for the main topic clusters and also your board plan.

It will serve as a visual board for your topical clusters and help you plan next steps on your account.

You can create one in Google Sheets – open a new sheet and write down all your main content categories.

Next, follow step 2.

2. Keyword Research

It can be overwhelming to get started, but it’s pretty simple.

As the first step, you want to map out your main keyword.

This is the main keyword for your business or blog. So if your blog is about keto diet, your main keyword will be probably keto recipes.

If you have a travel blog about European travel destinations, your main keyword will be Europe travel.

As a second step, you want to look at your Google sheet, and also add a main keyword to each of your content categories.

Remember that they may not exist in the same name format on Pinterest, so use the search bar to find the closest match to that keyword.

If you find more than one, write them down under each category name in your spreadsheet.

Finally, there is a thrid step, and that’s finding additional keywords for our category keywords (those you added in step two).

These may be a bit longer, but that’s perfectly fine – we just want to create a comprehensive map of the content as it exists on your blog, and match it with existing keywords on Pinterest.

You can find the additional category keywords using the same process – typing in the category keyword into the search bar and checking what comes up.

You can also make the process faster by using a tool like Pin Clicks (monthly subscription) or Pin Inspector (one off fee).

At this stage, I also like to research interests related to the main content categories, and write them down in a separate column, together with the search volumes.

You can use one of the above tools to make it faster, below is a discount code for Pin Inspector which is a great one off investment that will make keyword research much faster.

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Now that’s complete and we have our full list of keywords, we can start optimizing your account.

3. Account Optimization

Optimizing your account means just two things:

Username
Description

In addition to that, you should also make sure that:

Your account has a nice photo and cover photo
You are using business profile and not a personal one
You linked and verified your domain

Your username should include at least your main keyword or two, if you can fit them.

For your profile description, this doesn’t have as much weight but you mainly want to use it to attract potential followers and mention at least the main keyword.

Tell them what they get by following their account or how your content helps them.

4. Board Optimization

To optimize your boards, you want to first decide what to do with the boards you have, and then work on a list of new boards you want to create.

I like to download data for all of my boards directly from Pinterest analytics, and then analyze them (you can find the export button on top of the analytics).

I’m looking for boards with very low amount of impressions, saves and outbound clicks.

For those, I would either merge them with another board, or archive them. I never delete boards.

You should have at least one board for each keyword, which is a good start.

To add new boards, ideally you would have at least 2-3 boards for each topic cluster or category on your website, IF there is enough articles for that specific category.

There is no point creating a dedicated board for a topic if you only have two articles to share there. The idea is to keep the boards active all year round, and you can’t do that if you don’t have enough content.

What about group boards?

I don’t recommend keeping a lot of group boards, especially if they are not topically relevant. Keep only those that are relevant and have high amount of engagement. Archive the rest.

For board names, it’s better to use short, broad keywords, so you can save a lot of pins. Don’t forget to add keyword-optimized descriptions to each one.

Check out these articles to learn more about board optimization:

5. Pin Optimization

In addition to optimizing your account and boards, each new pin you add to the platform should be SEO optimized too.

The algorithm detects keywords from six different places, and from the pin itself, it looks at:

Title
Description
The url
Meta description of the landing page
Optical recognition and text on image

Using the keyword in the title and description is pretty obvious, but you should also know that Pinterest will scan your landing page, so it will look at the URL and the meta description of the page too.

Pinterest can also read the text in your image and detect objects, so make sure you use an image that correctly matches the topic of the pin – for example, pin about broccoli soup recipe should not use an image that has chicken in it.

Your visuals have the highest impact on the amount of saves your content gets, so don’t underestimate it.

Does it mean you should research keywords for each article you’re sharing?

Yes, that’s exactly what it means.

You should match the topic of your article with existing keywords on Pinterest and optimize all six places for maximum impact.

6. Posting Schedule

You can pin directly through Pinterest platform or use an approved publisher like tailwind, both of them work perfectly fine.

You should worry about consistency more than volume, creating only fresh pins and limiting the number of repins.

You can use the posting schedule below as a good starting point:

For new accounts, start with 1 – 3 pins per day, slowly scaling to 5 to 10 pins per day.

Established accounts older than one year, can post 10 to 15 pins per day, or up to 20 pins per day. More than that, Pinterest might consider it spam.

Summary

I haven’t stressed this enough at the beginning, but to succeed on Pinterest, you need three things:

Consistency + time + good strategy

You need to consistently pin your SEO-optimized, visually pleasing, fresh pins to well-optimized boards over a period of time to see significant results.

How long does it take to rank?

I was able to rank new content in less than a month for long-tail, less competitive keywords in a matter of weeks, so it will very much depend on your niche.

You can use PinClicks, to see what content ranks well for your keyword – or simply use an incognito window with your keyword in the Pinterest search bar.

FAQ & Common Mistakes:

Can I just copy my competitor’s boards and keywords?

No, you shouldn’t!

Your competitor has different content on their site, and their boards and keywords are based on that.

Their account probably accumulated some authority and ranking signals on those topics, so just because they are doing well for that specific keyword, doesn’t mean you will too.

How many boards should I have for my category?

That depends on the amount of content in that category, how often you create content, and whether it is seasonal content or not.

You should have 3 – 5 boards for your biggest categories as a general rule.

Can I create multiple accounts for my website on Pinterest?

I’ve seen a few people using this method, but it’s strictly against Pinterest’s community guidelines, and you will have your account suspended.

Is it worth joining comment or repin threads for Pinterest?

Absolutely no.

Comments are not counted as an engagement signal (as Pinterest clearly states on its support pages), and these coordinated efforts to manipulate engagement are against its community guidelines.

Plus a massive waste of time since comments don’t count as engagement signals.

Coordinated efforts to manipulate saves can be also very easily detected by their spam filters, so I would not recommend taking the risk.

Want to Learn More?

This PDF guide will give you a crash course in Pinterest Marketing – plus I included access to my free AI tool for creating SEO optimized titles & descriptions.