As Pinterest prepares to IPO, optimizers are faced with the reality of convincing clients to upload content into another walled garden social media network which to us reminds us of a weird mix of Houzz.com meets Darts. We’re not saying it’s not a great platform and very useful if you have more time on your hands than most people, yet as a search intent tool, good luck trying to compete with Google on getting clients to part with their adspend.
Pinterest is responsible, on average, for roughly 8% of referral traffic across the web yet everytime we look inside our clients’ Google Analytics accounts, that is far from the reality. Across 5 brand clients with over 4M monthly unique visitors, we’re seeing less than 1% referrals from Pinterest.
We understand that 84% of Pinterest users claim they use it to help them decide what to buy and the most popular searches on Pinterest are non-branded. Yet it’s a hard shoulder against the client wall to move the conversation to Pinterest.
We do see the Pinterest Smart Feed as being something to automate and take advantage of streamlining and automating content into their platform. That is by far the best SEO tip for engaging Pinterest users with minimal effort.