With over 450 million active users every month, Pinterest is a platform you don’t want to ignore as an online shop owner. According to the platform, 89% of its users use Pinterest to decide what they should buy next. So whether you’re a small business or sell all over the world, Pinterest is worth investing your time in. Want to start using Pinterest for your business or want to get more out of it? In this post, we’ll explain how Pinterest works and how you can get the most out of it. You’ll also find out how Yoast SEO can help you reach your goals.

Pinterest explained

Unlike common belief, Pinterest is not simply a social media platform. It’s also a visual search engine. Users browse the platform for ideas, called pins, that often link to other websites where you can read more or buy something. The pins are vertically shown images with an optimized meta description that provides the pin with context.

What’s cool about Pinterest is that it can actually show your pins in the feed of people who don’t know you yet. This is quite easy for Pinterest as its algorithm creates a personal feed for all of its users. This feed is based on someone’s recent search history and the people, boards, and topics they follow. When a user likes a pin and wants to save it, they can pin it on one of their own boards. This board is a collection of pins that they can easily go back to when they want to look at these pins again. When a user saves a pin, this pin is also automatically shown in their friends feed, increasing its reach even more. So if you optimize your own pins well, it can go viral if it reaches the right audience.

In contrast to social media such as Facebook and Twitter, a pin can generate traffic to your website for months to come. In fact, it’s more common for a pin to generate more traffic a few months after you put it live, as the power of sharing is incredibly important on Pinterest. Consider it a snowball effect: the more your pin gets repinned, the more Pinterest learns about your pin and who would enjoy seeing it in their feed. It bases this knowledge on the boards it’s placed on, the pin’s description, and the people who interact with it. That’s why a pin that doesn’t seem popular at first, can actually bring you more traffic after a while. When it’s been shared more and Pinterest has a good idea of what the pin is about.

How to claim your content on Pinterest using Yoast SEO

How to turn your pins into rich pins

Now that you’ve connected your Pinterest to your website, let’s not stop there. Because with just a little bit of effort, you can make sure that your pins show up as rich pins. With rich pins, there is a lot more information shown alongside the image. Information that Pinterest gets straight from your website, meaning that any changes will also be reflected in your rich pins. This type of pin will probably increase engagement as it gives a lot more information.

To get your own rich pins, Pinterest must authorize your site for them. To make sure your website is ready for rich pins, follow the steps on the rich pins validator page of Pinterest. If you’re not quite sure how to add metadata to your pages our page on how to get rich pins for your site can help you with that.

Product pins: the most important pins for you as a store owner

Pinterest has a few different types of pins, like article pins, app pins, product pins, and recipe pins. We’ll focus on product pins, as these are the kind of pins you will want to create as a shop owner. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can’t create any other pins. If you have a blog and want to reach people on Pinterest, article pins are the way to go. Or if you sell kitchen-related items and also share lots of recipes on your website, feel free to add recipe pins to your Pinterest account.

But rich product pins are always a good choice if you’re a shop owner. As they make it easier for your possible customers to see what you’re selling, how much it costs, whether it’s in stock, and more. By providing this information immediately, you’re grabbing the attention of your audience and will drive more traffic to your website.

Yoast WooCommerce SEO and Pinterest

The WooCommerce SEO plugin stitches the Yoast SEO schema output and the WooCommerce schema output together, making sure it’s one, coherent, graph. At the same time, it also enriches the output with several attributes. This means that, when you own an online store that runs on WooCommerce, you only need the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin on top of Yoast SEO to make sure Pinterest can get all relevant information. You just have to install the plugin, we’ll do the rest for you!

The moment you or someone else shares the product on Pinterest, we’ll make sure Pinterest understands it’s a product, what the price is, and who the seller is. On top of this, we’ll also explain to Pinterest that the main entity of the page is the product you sell. This way your pins will be shown in a rich and attention-grabbing way!

Structured data explained

Implementing structured data properly on your website has always been a hassle. In Yoast SEO we made this easier for you: instead of focusing on the technical specifics of your website, you can now focus on selling your product. We’ll focus on the right Schema implementation for you!

Schema.org is used to markup products, recipes, articles, and more. Search engines as Google and, of course, Pinterest can read this implementation and present it to their users. On top of this, search engines understand a page or website that has schema.org implemented better. Here’s a little story to show how it works. All in all, Schema.org is incredibly important for SEO. It will make your website a better search result as it will give your visitors an easier way to pick a result from the list of links.

Want to work on your product pages to make sure that you’re hitting the right note? And curious about what else our WooCommerce SEO plugin can do for you? Check out our article on writing product descriptions with the help of Yoast WooCommerce SEO:

Read more: Write great product descriptions with WooCommerce SEO »

How to promote your products and earn money on Pinterest – Yoast.