1. Add Your Website to Your Pinterest Profile
One of the first things that every business should do once they start their Pinterest account is to add their website to their profile. To add your website, all you need to do is go to “Settings” and click on “Edit Profile.” At the bottom you’ll be able to add any website.
However, if you are running a business then I highly suggest that you validate your Pinterest account as a business account.
When you validate your business account, your website will receive a check mark next to it to indicate that the website does belong to you. This is great for brand protection. It’s very easy for any user on Pinterest to put in your website and pretend to be you. The only thing that gives other users confidence that you do own that website is the check mark.
2. Have Your Website Mentioned in the Alt Tags of Your Pictures
As Pinterest has now become the second largest social referrer for online publishers, one of the best ways to maximize the traffic to your website is to actually have the website in your alt tags. This is because Pinterest’s official pin it buttons will scrape alt tags for their descriptions.
Donna Moritz of Socially Sorted does a wonderful job of putting her website in the alt tag of her photos.
This way anybody that does pin from your website with any official pin it button will now have the website mentioned in the pin’s description (unless they choose to change the Pinterest description). People can technically change the description, but most users generally don’t.
3. Add Your Website to Your Pin’s Description
If you’ve created a pin, and you want to drive traffic back to your site, then putting your website, or a specific url you want people to visit, in your pin’s description can help drive more traffic to your site. This way when people read the description they’re able to click on it.
The website is only clickable on desktop versions of Pinterest, and the url does get cut short, but will be bolded when shown on the news feed.
This can be extremely helpful in attracting more web traffic from people who are using Pinterest for the first time and may not know that they need to click twice on a pin to visit your website. (The first click enlarges the pin, the second click goes to the website.)
Even though people aren’t able to click on the website in the description on mobile versions, the actual website will be highlighted to help it stand out.
4. Put Your Website Address Inside Your Pins
Putting your website is a great way to put your website in front of tens of thousands to millions of people. As more and more people see your website from your pins, the more they’re going to be curious to visit it and offers your brand more credibility.
I encourage all Pinterest users to make sure that their website is, at the very least, visible on the mobile versions of Pinterest when their pin is clicked on. If your website is too tiny to see then it doesn’t help grow your brand.
Another reason to put your website on your own pins is to protect your brand and visuals.
I’ve seen many of my pins hijacked by other users and have them redirected to a different site that’s not mine. The only way that Pinterest that see that pin know where to find the pin’s content is through the website.
Mitt Ray from Social Marketing Writing always makes his websites very clear in his pins’ visual.
5. Add Rich Pins to Your Pinterest Account
In terms of maintaining a great online reputation on Pinterest, nothing beats rich pins.
Rich pins are additional pieces of information that are added to a pin. Right now rich pins are available for recipes, products, movies and online articles. This additional information can include such things as ingredients for the recipe, the price of the product, or the official title of the online article.
What’s great about rich pins is that it adds that extra call to action within your pins. Depending on what type of rich pin you’re looking to have you may need a webmaster, or if you run a WordPress site then you can consider using Yoast SEO for your blog, and there’s APG plugin for the other 3.
Here’s a rich pin for a blog, notice the call to action. This is automatically put there by Pinterest and it leads back to the site where the pin originates from.
6. Link Uploaded Photos Back to Your Site
One of the great things about Pinterest is that you can actually create photos that are related to your industry and have them relayed back to your site. Sony Electronic’s Pinterest board, “I Can haz Gadgets” does this.
Here’s a picture of a cute dog with a speaker made by Sony. When this pin is clicked on, it leads directly back to an e-store operated by Sony Electronics that sells the speaker that’s seen in the pin.
This way you don’t always have to use the pictures that are on your website. You can use those other photos, or create graphics that lure your customers in with curiosity.
To redirect the photo to a site that you want, all you need to do is edit the pin, and change the source of it.
Here’s a pin created by Kelly Liebermann of #PinChat about Hello Society. Notice at the bottom that you can edit the web address of the pin. You can technically change the web address of any pin that you’ve uploaded or repinned, but I don’t advise that you change another pinner’s source unless you are trying to redirect it to the original source of the pin.
Add Your Website to Comments on Pinterest
Another place to add your website is in the comments section of Pinterest. However, this tactic should be used with the utmost care and caution. If you randomly place your website in comments then Pinterest will mark your efforts as spam, and you won’t be able to comment on pins for about 24 hours.
You should only leave a web address in the comments when you are trying to provide extra value to a customer, an influencer. Let’s say you noticed that an influencer pinned a blue bracelet from your website, you can respond to suggest that another great item would be this wonderful blue night gown and then provide a link.
My suggestion is that if you are trying to comment on people’s pins, that if there is one particular customer or influencer that you want to leave a url with in the comments, that you leave that as the very last comment of the day.
Keep the pin opened in a new tab as a way to remind yourself that that is the last pin to comment on for the day.
Now let’s hear from you, what are some fantastic ways to drive more web traffic from Pinterest? Leave a note in the comments section and share with the rest of the Pinteresting community.