There’s no denying that SEO has changed. Long gone are the days when it was enough to build a tonne of links, sit back and watch your website rise up the rankings. The lines between SEO and content marketing are merging and in today’s fluid digital environment good PR and good SEO are becoming one and the same thing.
Social networks have become emblematic of this rapid shift towards relevant content and no more so than Pinterest. Breaking the record for fastest social network to 10 million users and referring more traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter combined, Pinterest has become impossible for any SEO or digital marketer to ignore.
Whilst its real potential may lie in brand awareness and referral traffic (Pinterest traffic is twice as likely to convert as that of Facebook), there is an SEO payoff for promoting your brand on Pinterest as well. Below are listed four of these benefits.
Online Reputation Management
The ability to control your brand’s reputation online is something every company should be thinking about. The ability to fill page one of a Google search page with your own online presence is an extremely useful thing and having a strong and well optimised Pinterest profile will be another string to your bow. If criticism or bad press does surface you’re going to want to have as many pages that you can control sat at the top of that Google search page, where you can respond quickly to any bad press and nip it in the bud with some good PR before it escalates.
Links Glorious Links
The first thing to be aware of here is that Pinterest does not pass link authority back to your site so if you’re thinking of pinning as much of your own content as possible then think again. In fact this will only serve to irritate your followers. This isn’t how Pinterest works and it’s unlikely Google will return Pinterest pages on competitive keyword searches. What Google does do however, is return your Pinterest profile in its search results on brand related searches. That’s if you’ve optimised your profile well, that is.
A well optimised, well maintained and active Pinterest profile may not earn you link authority directly but it will push your brand out there and the more people that discover your brand, the more people will be likely to repin your content and eventually link to it directly. If used effectively to spread your brand and build a real following your Pinterest users could soon be link building for you.
Pinterest is a type of Search Engine
This is important as it works on several levels. At one level it’s important to treat your Pinterest profile as you would treat your website and invest time into discovering exactly how you can optimise your profile and boards so that users will find you as easily as possible. There are countless guides to optimising your Pinterest profile and boards on the web but the principles really are quite straightforward.
Due to the nature of Pinterest as an image sharing site, its traditional appeal has always been to visually creative industries such as crafts, interior design and fashion. But Pinterest’s market appeal is starting to shift. The decision to make video content pinnable has opened the doors to new companies without an image catalogue of products or designs to pin to their pinboards. Video has the power to do so much more than an image on Pinterest and really create a sense of personality around your brand.
Creating separate pinboard for video content can really help you mark this content out when it is searched for. The more Pinterest continues to grow the more it will be seen as an image / video search engine, so getting your presence established and your content repinned now could pay dividends in the future.
The Perfect Research Tool for your Blogger Outreach Campaign
There are so many brilliant ways that a well optimised and well maintained Pinterest presence can bring benefits to your business and the more you engage with it the more it will keep giving. Using Pinterest as a research tool for blogger outreach isn’t the most obvious benefit but if you want to understand your market and target your traditional SEO link building campaign on the real movers and shakers in your industry, then Pinterest could well be an essential part of your arsenal.
With the network now surpassing 70 million users there is huge potential to use Pinterest as both research tool and first point of contact. Repinning someone else’s content is the perfect way to show your appreciation for what they do and will give you a clear advantage when you come to propose a guest post on their website. Even if they say no, you know your efforts will have inevitably paid off in other ways.
Author Bio: Joe Cox writes for Bristol based video production company, Hurricane Media, who have been running successful video marketing campaigns since 2005, working with clients across many industry sectors. Former clients include Asda, Barclaycard, BMW, Sony, Peugot and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.
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