It’s a pretty well-known fact that Pinterest is a powerhouse when it comes to driving traffic to your website, but have you ever sat down and thought about how to keep the visitors coming back for more, sharing your post, and actually reading the information on the page once they’ve landed there?
If Pinterest is sending you traffic but your blog isn’t optimized for it, it’s essentially a wasted opportunity! Wouldn’t you agree? After reading this post you will have learned 7 essential steps to lower the bounce rate of people coming to your site from Pinterest, capture your visitor’s information so you can stay in contact with them long after they leave your blog post, and enable them to share your content on Pinterest FOR YOU to get more eyeballs on your brilliant content. Sound good? Keep reading.
1. Add An Opt-in To Your Blog
This is a must! it’s sooo so important to have an opt-in on your blog. You don’t want people to come to your blog and jump back onto Pinterest where you may never ever see them again! You want them to subscribe to your email list where you can build a relationship with them and hopefully down the road, turn them into a paying customer or client.
There are several places on your blog where you should include your opt-in. You should include it in the blog itself, on the side bar, in the footer, and (this one’s optional) as a pop up.
I’m gonna be brutally honest for a second. Having an opt-in that says “subscribe to my blog” isn’t gonna cut it here. You need to offer your visitors a super juicy, easy yes free offer that’s relevant to your blog post in exchange for their email address. You gotta give a little to get a little. This will help you grow your email list MUCH faster.
Speaking of opt-ins, here’s a good one for you! If you’re new to Pinterest or wondering how to set up your Pinterest account to actually get the traffic were talking about to your blog or business, grab your copy of The Pinterest Quick Start Guide
2. Format Your Blog Post For Easy Reading
Making your blog post easy to read is a crucial step in optimizing your blog post for Pinterest. Remember, people aren’t necessarily reading every word of your blog post. It’s best to break up your blog post into easily digestible sections with small paragraphs and large sub headers. This makes the content less overwhelming for the reader and allows them to skim the post to easily find what they need.
It’s also important to make sure your formatting is mobile responsive. 80% of Pinners use the Pinterest mobile app, which means a huge portion of your Pinterest visitors are visiting your site from their phones. If your formatting looks wack on mobile, you’re going to get a lot of people bouncing off your site and not consuming the brilliant content you worked so hard on.
3. Add Social Share Buttons
Installing social share buttons on your site makes it easy for people who enjoyed your blog post to share your content with their social media connections and networks, in our case Pinterest! When someone clicks the Pinterest share button they will be prompted to save one of the available images within your post to their Pinterest account. This increases your domain authority on Pinterest and expands the reach of your content to new audiences that will, in turn, generate new users back to your website
4. Install The Pinterest Save Button
The Pinterest Save button is the clickable Pinterest logo that appears on a website’s images. When one of your readers clicks on the save button, it enables them to pin your blog post straight from your website to Pinterest. This improves your domain authority on Pinterest, which is great for the overall health of your Pinterest account.
To build your Pinterest save button, head to https://developers.pinterest.com/tools/widget-builder/ and design your save button on Pinterest’s widget builder. When you’re done, they will give you a custom code to place on your website to enable the button.
If you want to avoid code, you can also enable a Pinterest save button by using WordPress plugins such as Social Warfare or Tasty Pins.
5. Optimize Your Images
Optimizing your images for Pinterest includes hiding a few Pinterest specific vertical images (2:3 ratio) on your post that can be pinned from your website to Pinterest, adding set Pin descriptions, and disabling images you don’t want to be pinned on Pinterest. There’s two ways you can do this, the first is by using an all in one plugin and the second is using small snippets of code.
- Tasty Pins Plugin – For WordPress Users
If coding freaks you out and you want an all-in-one easy to use plugin to help you optimize your blog posts for Pinterest, Tasty Pins is the way to go. Tasty Pins is an affordable light-weight WordPress plugin that allows you to do everything you need to do to optimize your images from Pinterest. The Tasty Pins Plugin allows you to:
– Set pin descriptions
– Utilize alt text for SEO
– Hide Pinterest specific images from your page
– Disable pinning for certain images
– Add a Pin It hover button on all images
– Force pinning of hidden images
At $29 a year, this is a pretty great value for the convenience it provides. - A Little Bit of Easy Coding
If you don’t have a WordPress website or want to keep costs down, a little bit of coding will accomplish what we need to optimize your blog images. I promise it’s not hard, don’t let the word “code” freak you out. This post contains the most important Pinterest HTML scripts but if you’re a coding wiz and want more customizations you can head to Pinterest’s HTML reference page for developers. Ok, I’m going to make this as easy as possible and break this down step by step. Let’s do this!
How to Install The Pinterest Script
First things first, you need to install the Pinterest pinit.js script to the footer script section of your website. If you have WordPress, the easiest way to add this code is Theme Settings Appearance > Customize > Theme Settings > Header/Footer Scripts.
If you have something like kajabi, squarespace, wix, or something else. A quick google search should show you where to find the footer section. Once you’ve found the footer section, copy and paste the following code:
<script async defer src=“//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js”</script>
This allows you to add the Pinterest HTML code for specific actions. Without the code above in the footer, they won’t work.
How To Disable Unwanted Images From Being Pinned To Pinterest With Code
Sometimes people want to save blog posts directly from a website. This builds domain authority on Pinterest (which is great!) but we want to make sure the images being pinned from our website are optimized for Pinterest. We don’t want people pinning our horizontal images, screenshots, or affiliate banners… we want them pinning our pretty pins that are optimized for search!
To disable images you don’t want pinned to Pinterest, all you have to do is add this tiny snippet of code to your already existing image code. All you have to do to add this code is follow the tiny, bite-sized, easy to follow steps below.
Step 1: Go to the edit screen for your blog post and hit “text” or “html” view.
Step 2: locate your image codes within the post. They typically start with “<img class=” or “<figure class=”
Example: <img class=”alignnone wp-image-2951 size-full” src=”http://thepinperspective/visable-image-1.jpg” alt=”this is my visible image” width=”800″ height=”600″ />
Step 3: add the code data-pin-nopin=“true” right before “/>” at the end of your image code.Example: <img class=”alignnone wp-image-2951 size-full” src=”http://thepinperspective/visable-image-1.jpg” alt=”this is my visible image” width=”800″ height=”600″ data-pin-nopin=“true” />
How To Hide Multiple Pinterest Specific Images Within Your Post With Code
With another small bit of code we can add more Pinterest optimized images for people to pin from your website without them actually showing on your post! Pretty cool right? To do this, follow the steps below
Step 1: add the images you would like to be invisible to your post. You can put these images anywhere on the page but I like to add mine at the end of the post to make it easy.
Step 2: Go to the edit screen for your blog post and hit “text” or “html” view.
Step 3: Locate the code for the images you would like to be invisible and add the code <div style =”display:none;”> to the beginning of the code.
Example:
<div style =”display:none;”><img class=”alignnone wp-image-2951 size-full” src=”http://thepinperspective/hidden-image-1.jpg” alt=”this is my hidden image” width=”800″ height=”600″ />
How To Add a Set Pin Description With Code
Adding a keyworded pin description will help your pins get found by new people in search when one of your viewers shares your blog post to Pinterest directly from your website. This is the most important thing you can do when optimizing your images for Pinterest.
To add a pin description to your pin image, you will need to add the code pin-data-description=”yada yada yada” before the “/>” at the end of your image’s code.
Example:
<div style =”display:none;”><img class=”alignnone wp-image-2951 size-full” src=”http://thepinperspective/hidden-image-1.jpg” alt=”this is my hidden image” width=”800″ height=”600″ pin-data-description=”yada yada yada” />
6. Add Metadata To Enable Rich Pins
Metadata sounds almost as scary as coding, but I promise it’s actually a pretty simple concept. Metadata is just data that describes the information in your post. Pinterest pulls from metadata when you activate rich pins on your account.
Rich pins are just pins that automatically sync information from your website to your pins. This provides more information on the pin, in addition to your pin description, giving a richer experience to a viewer and increasing engagement. They also help with Pinterest SEO and give a nice little boost to your website’s authority on Pinterest.
Many website themes have a location to add metadata to your blog posts and website, but they don’t all make it easy. If you’re having a hard time, consider downloading the plugin YOAST. Yoast is an easy to use search engine optimization plugin for wordpress that will allow you to add all the required metadata to your website. If you’re using another website provider and having trouble, contact your providers help desk to assist you with this. As a bonus, metadata will also help boost your authority with Google!
Once you’ve added metadata to your blog posts, head over to Pinterests handy dandy validator to apply for rich pins and follow the steps below:
Step 1: Choose any page on your site that you’ve added metadata to and enter your chosen URL into the validator and click Validate. (You only need to validate 1 URL to apply for Rich Pins. No need to submit all of your URLs)
Step 2: If you have any problems it will show you where they are and tell you to correct them. You may not have any problems at all!
Step 3: Once you’ve corrected your problems, select one of three options to indicate how you’ve marked up your pages: HTML Tags (if you are using Open Graph or Schema.org metadata), oEmbed (if you used the oEmbed format) or Shopify (if you have a Shopify store). Step 4: click apply now. The application process may take up to 24 hours.
7. Check Your Site Speed
If your blog loads too slow, Pinterest users will jump off your site so fast they get whiplash. Humans are an impatient species. If you have high bounce rates from Pinterest this could be the reason why my friend. Bonus – improving your site speed will boost your authority on Google as well. One of the first things I do when signing on new Pinterest management clients is check their site speed… most had no idea their website was so slow! It’s a very common problem.
To check site speed I like to use the seo analyzing tool by Ubersuggest as well as Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
I like Ubersuggest because it tells you how fast your website loads on both mobile and desktop. It also gives you a ton of insight into the overall health of your website, in terms of SEO, if you’re trying to rank on google
I like using Google’s PageSpeed Insights in addition to Ubersuggest because it tells you what google scores your pages site speed as and tells you exactly what’s slowing down your site and gives you suggestions for how to fix the problems.
Once you’ve run each test on your website, take the steps you need to take to fix as many of the problems as you can to improve your website’s speed.
The Takeaway
Pinterest traffic is only worth your while if your blog is optimized for it and lucky for you, you now know the 7 essential factors you need to include for your blog to be geared up and ready for the traffic to flood the gates! If you’re new to Pinterest and this is all very overwhelming for you. Grab your copy of The Pinterest Quick Start Guide above for a step-by-step guide on how and where to get started.
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