It’s no secret that companies are using Pinterest for marketing purposes and doing so successfully. Pinterest is a great tool for raising brand awareness, driving traffic back to your website and increasing sales.
This post isn’t your traditional post about how to use Pinterest for marketing. Instead it will show you 4 ways that Pinterest can help you find link building opportunities. This will assist you in optimizing your website or blog for search engines.
So how does link building help you rank higher in Google or Bing when people put in the key words or phrases that they would use to find your products and services?
The Importance of Links
Search engines will put a higher importance on the value of your website or blog depending on how many websites or blogs are linking to your site. In essence the more sites that link to your site, the better your site will rank in search engines. Also the more authority those sites have also helps your website ranking in search results.
As an example, a link from the New York Times website to your site has more value than a lonely blogger in outback Australia linking to you.
So link building is important if you want to reach the holy grail of ranking on page one of Google, Bing or other search engines.
Here are 4 ways to build links by using Pinterest.
#1: Use Pinterest to Find Guest Blog Opportunities
There are some negative connotations about guest blogging due to the latest video by Matt Cutts but guest blogging, when done correctly has great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits. If you keep an eye out for guest blog post red flags, this type of link building is still very effective. In many cases, the outreach for the guest posting can take as long as the actual writing.
I’ve found Pinterest can help speed up that process by doing the following:
- Utilize the Categories Feature: One of the quickest ways to find potential guest posting sites is by searching the categories section on Pinterest. By hovering over the Categories section you can quickly find a possible topic that fits your industry.
When searching specific categories the possibilities are endless so you will want to focus on pins that are tied to a blog post. For example, if I were working on a site in the health industry I could start by searching the Health & Fitness Category. Within seconds I came across the following pin: The 63 Best Health & Fitness Apps.
By clicking on the pin for additional details you can usually determine if the opportunity is worth looking into or not. Things I usually look at to know if the opportunity is worth pursuing include:
- The domain the pin is coming from: If the pin above (63 Apps) were coming from a site like menshealth.com or 24hourfitness.com or another high-end site, chances are you are not going to get a post published there. What you’re really looking for here are authoritative blogs that allow guest contributors. Blogs that accept guest posts will normally say on their website something like, “Become a Contributor,” “We Accept Guest Posts,” or “Write For Us.”
- The board individuals are pinning things to: This is rare but something to keep in mind. It is always good to look at the title of the board individuals are pinning things to. This helps you understand a user’s intent and if the site can lead to opportunities. For example, individuals might pin images of fruits and vegetables onto their Food boards from a site like Trader Joe’s. That may or may not be the opportunity you are looking for.
- “Pin-Stalking” Other User Profiles: What I like to call, “pin-stalking” simply means looking at a user’s information in great detail. With the 63 Best Health & Fitness Apps article, you will notice things like; the original user who pinned the image, who re-pinned and/or liked the image, the user’s pin board, the source (link) of the pin and a few other things highlighted below:
As you can see from the example above a single pin can generate many opportunities to look into.
#2. Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is a great way to participate in conversations about topics within your industry and often times results in a link back to your site. Most platforms that are used for blogging let you fill out the following fields, name, email and website. The individuals name is what will be displayed when leaving a comment, which will be a link to the website that was specified in the website field.
By adding valuable insights about the blog post you are rewarded with a link back to your site. That link not only builds an individual’s credibility on the subject, but helps search engines create an association between your site and the topic that you commented on. The greater the association between your site certain topics or categories will help your site to rank higher for key phrases.
The process of finding sites to blog comment on is the same here as it is with guest blogger outreach:
- Utilize the Categories Feature
- Pin-Stalk Other User’s Profiles
#3. Find Sites To Host A Giveaway
There are a number of benefits to finding a site to giveaway your products. When strategically placing your products on other sites you have the potential to reach your “target audience” by tapping into the sites network of users.
Target is an example of a company that leveraged the readership of a popular mommy blog to reach their target audience and gave away an Eddie Bauer Trail Hiker. In order to enter these kinds of giveaways, a user will often have to like, share and tweet about the giveaway. This results in more target audience exposure, bonus!
The easiest way to do this is by using the search feature on Pinterest. More than likely the blogs that host these kinds of giveaways will cross- promote the giveaway on Pinterest. You can start by searching for the keyword giveaway. From there you can begin to refine your search even more by using targeted phrases (ex. dress giveaway) or the Boards and Pinners filter.
#4. Competitive Link Analysis
If you have started to use Pinterest for your business then your competitors probably have too.
Pinterest has an amazing feature that allows you to quickly find the pins from a given domain. You can see all the images pinned from your competitors site, (as well as your own) by using the source feature of Pinterest.
For example, when I look up the source for SEO.com, I can quickly assess the types of content they are sharing and what they are trying to get others to share.
This source tool can show you many things about your competitors:
- What are your competitors pinning.
- Who they are following.
- Who is following/pinning their stuff.
- What’s working for them that might work for you.
This will help you understand how your competitors are marketing themselves on Pinterest and give you ideas on what you could be doing. It can also help you discover some of the “influencers” on Pinterest in addition to “Community Boards” that you could contribute to broaden the reach of the items you pin.
For me, it’s much easier to search through a series of images than it is to sort through numerous search results pages. Have you discovered any good link building opportunities through Pinterest? I would love to hear you comments below.
Guest Author: TJ Welsh works as a Director of SEO for SEO.com, an agency dedicated to helping companies grow their online presence. By the way, they have a great Pinterest Marketing ebook.
Want to Learn More About How to Create Compelling Content that Your Audience Wants to Read, View and Share?
My book – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media” – will show you how.
