Ashley:
It’s looking like we’re having chat issues again with panelists, so panel or crew, if you guys want to put any links or resources or anything inside the chat box, just chat them over me and I’ll get them over to everyone.
Arsen Rabinovich:
Did my chat not go through to everyone?
Casey Markee:
No, nothing did.
Ashley:
Yeah-
Kate:
It’s some weird settings. It does that in our Zoom too, when we do calls. It’s ridiculous.
Ashley:
Yeah, it looks like yours just went to the panelists, Arsen, but don’t worry everyone who’s attending, I’ll make sure all the links and resources will still go into the recap page. I think that’s a pretty decent time to do the transition, so let’s get started. Welcome to the 25th episode of SEO Providers. Today, we’re going to talk about Pinterest Organic with our very special guest, Kate. Thank you so much for joining us. She’s the owner and founder of Simple Pin Media. In this episode, we are going to dive straight into Pinterest Organic, ask Kate a bunch of Pinterest-related questions, and at the end, we’re going to go over the recent Google update, the lovely, Helpful Content Update. If you have questions about Pinterest or the update, as always, go ahead and drop them over into the Q and A box, which that is at the bottom of Zoom.
Ashley:
If you press the more, you’ll see a Q and A. If you click on that, that will open up the Q and A. Oh, it looks like we already got one in there. Thank you. Make sure you go ahead and put all of your questions in there. If we don’t get to all of them, we will get to them in the recap blog post, which is published a week later, which includes the video replay, all the resources, the links, all the good stuff, and of course the transcript as well. Okay, let’s started. Kate, tell us about your journey with Pinterest. I’m so curious to hear how different your Pinterest strategies are now, from when maybe you first joined Pinterest. Can you just expand on what that’s been like?
Kate:
Yeah, sometimes I like to joke I’m a Pinterest historian, because I’ve just seen all these iterations of how it’s moved through over the years. But I would say, so much of when I started in 2014 was really just basic. There wasn’t a whole lot of extra. We had one pin, we had one method, that was pretty much it. And over the years, there’s been things that they’ve peeled back the layers of; adding Pinterest ads, adding video, adding idea pins, and now really leaning into shopping and eCommerce. And I think as we’ve seen these changes, what’s been interesting about this platform amongst all the others, is that the key things have always been keywords and images, and then consistency. Those haven’t changed. I sometimes appreciate, from the Instagram, the Facebook, “Write this, don’t write this, hashtag this, don’t hashtag this.” And I think sometimes in its simplicity, we can make it a little bit harder than it needs to be.
Kate:
I would say strategies for me in the beginning really were the amount of pins and of the same type of pin, a standard pin. That’s how we get it out. Now, it’s more diversified. You have different avenues to use, to connect with people at different times on the platform, and different ways. And truthfully, I kind of like where we’re at now, because if you’re a product seller, you have way more options for your digital eBooks, or whatever it is, to sell those on Pinterest than you did, say, even three or four years ago. I just think the options have opened up, but it can make it complicated and confusing. But I really do think now it’s just all about where you’re putting your efforts and how you’re diversifying that.
Ashley:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, especially because back in the day it was so limiting for a brand. Traffic was the best thing and then once they landed on your site, good luck to you.
Kate:
Exactly.
Ashley:
Traffic is the biggest thing for bloggers and SEO for bloggers. What tips do you have to utilize Pinterest as a traffic-driving referral source? Especially where we’re at now, where, like you mentioned, we have so many options with Pinterest.
Kate:
Yeah, you really do. All I would say is Pinners are in three buckets. They want to be inspired, they want to be informed and then they want to make a decision. This is the framework we use at Simple Pin. You’re trying to hit them in a lot of these different categories. Decide always happens on your website. That’s where they sign up for an email or they click on a box or they take an action. You’re not going to get people who are… Because Pinterest users are cold. My new favorite analogy is Pinterest is the library, Instagram is the bar. Pinners go to Pinterest and they’re like, “I only care about myself right now. I don’t want you to talk to me. I just want to get straight to the recipe. I want to get straight to the piece of content and answer my question.”
Kate:
On Instagram, we’re killing time and all these other things. And so if we look at how we connect with that person in that inspire phase or the inform phase, what’s going to move them off. And while I do think there’s more options with idea pins, video pins, Pinterest ads, and we have seen the traffic be depressed, which we’ve seen the traffic overall, and all platforms go like this, it’s still that thing that Pinners… It’s the one platform out there that the user knows I have to move off to get more info. And so we can use that to our advantage by just giving them enough, in the image specifically, that they’re like, “Okay, I want to know more.” Or, “I connect with this.” I think when it comes to how we leverage it today, I would say images and keywords are still king for traffic.
Ashley:
If we’re starting from scratch, say we publish a new blog post, how many pins would you say is appropriate to help promote that blog post, if we’re really breaking down strategy?
Kate:
Yeah. I would say it depends on what type of content creator you are. if we took a food blogger, there are so many different shots. There’s in process, there’s final shot, there’s close up with the ingredients. First, you start with what you have. The common trap is to try to go super wide at first, to be like, “I want 25 images per blog post,” when it’s like, no, let’s start with what you already have. You know this serves the post, this serves the user, and we can use those to leverage for our Pinterest. Some people want to try images without text, some people want to try images with text. And with that first post that you put onto Pinterest, you don’t know what’s going to resonate. You don’t know what people are going to… The common joke is, somebody who makes a chicken recipe, sometimes people love their raw chicken breast.
Kate:
You’re like, “What? Why did that ugly part take off? Who cares about a frozen, ugly chicken breast?” But it feels familiar to people. Most people have it in their freezer or have it in their fridge and they’re like, “Oh, I can make that.” Start with what you already have, pin it onto Pinterest, and we can talk about the strategicness of pinning right, and then let that really sit and resonate for about, I don’t know, two to three months, before you get panicky and you’re like, “I need to create more.” Because Pinterest users, the great part is you don’t know when somebody’s going to engage with your content. You don’t know when it’s going to be shown to people, so you really have to give it this three months’ timeframe, go back to the analytics, and Pinterest analytics are getting better, which we appreciate, and you can see… Actually, the first benchmark is 30 days, so you can see how those pins did and take away some information from it.
Kate:
That is a very long way to say, stick with what you have there. Now, if you are a content creator that maybe just has one pillar image at the top, because it’s more long form, it’s an article, there’s not really a whole lot you can do with it, you can go ahead and create two to three more that are different and have different sayings on them. Have different text overlay, because you also don’t know what buzzwords are going to catch on Pinterest. Because Pinners are thumbing by so fast that you’re like, “I don’t know what’s going to connect with them.” Those are kind of the two opposites here, but ask yourself what feels manageable that I can make, and then what feels like a good middle ground for what I can go back and really test and look at? Instead of, I hear people are like, “I’m going to create 25 per post.” Slow your roll. Three is good. Start there.
Ashley:
Got it. I think it’s really interesting that you mentioned waiting two to three months, because I feel like in these days with having access to so much data, to wait two to three months for just a single blog post is so difficult to do without going in and messing up the pin and changing everything again and not giving it enough time. Is there a specific reason behind the two to three months? Is that just based on what you’ve seen from… That’s about, on average, how long it takes to collect enough user data?
Kate:
It is, yeah. And it’s really based on the main algorithm of Pinterest. If we look at Pinterest in the main home feed when you open up your app, that home feed is a culmination of things you’re interested in, boards you have, ads they want to show you, people they suggest you follow, and then interests. It’s not time-based. If I am suddenly interested in how to make a banana cream pie, Pinterest goes, “Ah-a, Kate’s really interested in a banana cream pie. We’re going to flood her feed with 10 of them.” Well, you may have pinned your banana cream pie six months ago, and now Pinterest is scanning the platform to see what is their most engaged content first, and putting it there for me to access right away.
Kate:
And so that’s why we have to wait a little bit longer, because if you follow me or if I follow you, let’s stick with the banana cream pie, and you pin your banana cream pie today, I might not see it. Later, Pinterest can choose 14 days, 30 days. If they’re like, “Oh, Kate follows Ashley and she posted this whole thing about a banana cream pie. We’re just going to tuck that in now, 30 days later.” It really is that lingering data, because you don’t know when it’s going to get in front of people.
Ashley:
That definitely makes sense. I wanted to get a little bit granular on the pins that promote blog piss… Wow, blog post pages these days. Sorry everyone. Is it-
Arsen Rabinovich:
Need to write down this timing that this happened.
Ashley:
This is not a blooper moment that will be shared on social media. Is it better to just show pins on blog posts, or is hiding pins using plugins like WPTC Pins or Social Warfare. God, words are so hard right now. Is that better play than just showing the pins on blog post pages?
Kate:
I would say maybe a couple of years ago, I would’ve… I’d go back to user experience. This is where I’m leading from. A lot of people who would visit your website, they’re working inside the Pinterest app already, and there’s a save button at the top. In that save button, Pinterest is going to pull all the images. Whether or not you have it on the page or whether or not you have it hidden, I would say at this time, I don’t think there is a whole lot of difference for that, based on preference. I choose to have my Pinterest image right there. Takes up a little bit more space for me and I like it. I also do get a lot of traffic from Google. But before, what we could do is we could count on that Google traffic saving to Pinterest. But I just don’t know if we can rely on that or see that as much anymore, to where I would say it’s not a deal breaker. It’s really, I would say, it comes back to preference.
Kate:
But if you know that your stuff is commonly shared on Pinterest, I would do everything I could to make sure they did share it. And it was optimized in a way that when they share it, then it goes out there, because I’ve seen a lot of people, their pins go viral off of really crappy images, sidebar images, and you didn’t put that in there, the optimized pin image, and then it’s mismatched too. I’ve seen somebody who created a blog post about how to teach your kids how to tie shoes, and somebody pinned a spinach dip. And the spinach dip photo is going along with how to tie shoes, and what’s interesting is that Pinterest categorized that with the photo, instead of the actual content. And so the photo matches everything about a spinach dip. She’s not talking about spinach dip, she’s talking about how to tie shoes. In that sense, do all you can to optimize. If you have a couple where you don’t do it, it’s not a deal breaker, but I would check all your boxes.
Ashley:
And this is something Andrew echoes all the time, is knowing your user. If you know your user behavior patterns with what they do on Pinterest and how they engage with you, why not embrace that more? That totally makes sense.
Kate:
Yeah.
Andrew Wilder:
There’s also a potential gotcha. If you’re hiding a lot of pins, if you’re using a hidden pins feature, some of the plugins put that at the top of the post, and then if you’re trying… They don’t get lazy loaded, and that can actually slow down your First Contentful Paint. We’ve gotten tripped up by that. It’s especially noticeable if you’re hiding five or 10 hidden pins. Kate, you were saying do three at the most, that’s great. But you could just hide one and have a different one on the page too, or use the same image. That’s fine too, but you don’t want to be giving people 40 pins to choose from and slowing down your site accidentally.
Kate:
Talk about decision fatigue, right?
Casey Markee:
Right. And I think one of the biggest issues that we see is, especially during audits, is that we have a lot of people who optimize their blog post for Pinterest, for strategy, and then of course that’s hurt them in this most recent environment, because there’s a very different way to write for a Pinterest audience, as opposed to writing for your Google first audience. We’ve seen a lot of people put multiple pins on a page below the recipe card, and not only does that increase DOM notes, but it’s a very poor user experience. Like you said, personal preference, but if you’re saying, and let me just clarify and make sure I don’t want to put words in your mouth, you’re saying that, again, if most people are in the app, they’re going to pull out those hidden pins anyway.
Kate:
Mm-hmm.
Casey Markee:
You’d prefer to, if you’re going to really want to set yourself up for success, not create any technical issues, as Andrew said, not create any page speed issues, not create any needless scrolling on mobile devices. Don’t put those pins below the recipe card. I would just hide them, and like Kate said, maybe three, max, would be a good approach to take.
Kate:
Yeah. Can I say this too? Because I think as content creators, one of the things we don’t do, because we’re tired, is we don’t get on our phone and open the Pinterest app and look at what our stuff looks like. Because if you click on it and you are annoyed, chances are everybody else is too. And click on other people’s content. What do you like? What do you not like? What pops up for you? Spend at least 10 minutes just on Pinterest doing market research. It can’t hurt you and you can see what’s new in the app. You can mess around with it, because a lot of us function on desktop. We’re in this mode of creating our pins on a really big screen, uploading on a really big screen. Open up your phone and just play around with the app. You just never know what it’s going to look like.
Ashley:
Yeah, it’s 101 marketing, just using your own research and seeing what’s out there. I absolutely love that. Diving into descriptions, I would love to hear your thoughts and what some of your best optimization tactics are when you write your pin descriptions.
Kate:
Yeah. I would say, number one, it’s going to be just writing it natural sounding sentences and don’t use hashtags. I know Pinterest has flip-flopped over the years and they cannot make up their mind, but just ignore them. You want to write one to two sentences, max, and write that in a natural sounding sentence with putting your keywords in there. This is what we’ve really advised people to do for years. You can go up to 500 characters, but what we find happens with that, when you get three or four sentences, is you start to split hairs with your keywords, instead of really focusing on one or maybe two. And so you want to write it like you’re sending a text to a friend. “This banana cream pie is so amazing. It’s gluten free, it’s dairy free. You should try this at your next Halloween party, and make [inaudible 00:20:31]-
Casey Markee:
Just want to interject and say that I personally, really appreciate that Kate is using banana cream pie in her descriptions.
Kate:
I know, sorry. Is there a back story on this?
Casey Markee:
Because I am super, super appreciative. I’m a very big fan of banana cream pie. I am a banana cream pie aficionado. I probably have banana cream pies, I’m going to say, I know this is going to destroy people, I know this is going to really… I want to make sure you guys are setting down. I probably eat more banana cream pie than bacon. Just saying. Okay, back to our program.
Ashley:
To bring that back outside of banana cream pie, I almost felt like we were literally talking about Meta descriptions or something specific for SEO, because everything that you said is what these guys talk about on a regular basis, is, “Write natural language. Don’t keyword stuff.” The only thing that totally threw me off was the hashtags. No more hashtags?
Kate:
No, no, because when you use a hashtag, number one, people replace the keyword with a hashtag and it breaks the keyword search on Pinterest. That’s number one. Number two, the user doesn’t use hashtags. Nobody goes on to Pinterest in the search bar and does, “Hashtag vegan muffin.” They don’t search in that way. If the user habit is one way and you’re going against the grain, don’t do it. Now, I want to say this; if you have been new to Pinterest, there is some dumb email somewhere, that somebody hasn’t edited, from Pinterest, that still says something about hashtags, but yet all their other materials, and they have a really great resource called the Pinterest Business Community.
Kate:
Now, if you want to get as close to Pinterest as you can get, I highly recommend you join that. Everybody with a Pinterest account can go in there. It’s for creators. You can vent, you can ask questions, you can troubleshoot tech. Go look for it. It’s great. And they will tell you, even in the Pinterest business community, “Don’t use hashtags.” Just stick with the sentences. Hashtags aren’t searchable. They used to highlight, now they’re not highlighting. It’s a classic Pinterest can’t make up their mind, but we’re going to make it up for them. Not going to use them.
Ashley:
I’m trying to find the link so I can drop it in. Would it happen to be community.pinterest.biz, or business-
Kate:
Yeah, it is… Let me tell you what it is.
Ashley:
… community resource?
Kate:
Yeah. Did you say community?
Ashley:
Yes.
Kate:
Yeah, I think that’s it.
Ashley:
The community.pinterest.biz?
Kate:
Yep.
Ashley:
There’s 30,000 members? Okay, I’m dropping link. Hopefully that’s the right one, and if not, don’t worry everyone, we’ll get it cleared up.
Kate:
Yep, no, that’s it. That’s it.
Ashley:
Perfect.
Kate:
You’ll log in and it will ask for authorization with your account. Go ahead and give it authorization. It’s just fine. We’re actually part of the flagship program as Pinterest pioneers-educators in there, so you’ll see us answering questions as we go along. There’s a group of people that have been close to the Pinterest creators or the Pinterest employees that are really leading the charge to create a better bridge between Pinterest corporate and Pinterest creators. That’s their main hub to do that.
Ashley:
Awesome. That’s such a great resource. Thanks for sharing that. On the keyword research side of things, how do you go about your keyword research for Pinterest? Assuming it sounds a little bit like what we do on the SEO side of things, but do you have any specific tactics?
Kate:
Yeah. There’s only two places right now that we have for keyword research. There’s been a lot of people who have tried to create keyword tools along the way, but we haven’t found them to be very effective. Trends from Pinterest is their one main one. You can find it by going to trends.pinterest.com. What we like about this and how they’re continuing to improve it is, they’re branching it out between the US, the UK and Canada, which really helps creators who are targeting their home country. Oftentimes, Canadians and US audiences will cross paths a little bit, so you can toggle back and forth. But you put in a keyword and you can see when the search volume is highest toward that particular keyword, which is great, because if you have a seasonal component to your content, you know how to get out ahead of that, especially the six to eight weeks.
Kate:
If your people love US Thanksgiving, and of course, Canadian Thanksgiving is at the beginning of October, you need to be ramping it up right now, beginning of September. It’s going to feel weird to talk about Thanksgiving, but get it in there. That’s number one. Number two is the search bar on Pinterest. You just want to put in your words into the search bar, whatever comes up with prediction is what those phrases or words are most popular. They have a guided search box. Again, it’s like, one day it’s there, one day it’s gone, who knows? But you’ll see those guided search bubbles with keywords that pop up along the top. You can keep clicking on those and go down a black hole of what is most popular with keyword terms. That’s another thing that we use.
Kate:
I want to address something really quick, because some people will ask me this about, they hear about it on Instagram, and it’s the shadowbanned thing, and I get this question all the time when it comes to shadowbanning themselves or a keyword on Pinterest. The only way that you can find that is by searching… Well, let me back up. It doesn’t really exist on Pinterest. They don’t really do shadowbanning, because that’s attached to hashtags, and because Pinterest doesn’t have hashtags, it’s not a thing. When you type in a word at the top, if you do not see something populated that seems like a very common phrase; dieting is one of them, how to lose weight, you won’t see it. What that means is that Pinterest is deprioritizing that keyword and they’re not making it something that’s easy for people to find.
Kate:
That doesn’t mean there’s not content on the platform of how to lose weight, but in Pinterest’s push towards body positivity, they’re going to push that back down. If you do talk about weight loss, you might want to get really creative with your phrases on Pinterest, to where it doesn’t get you caught up in the how to lose weight bucket. You want to use that search bar there at the top.
Ashley:
Yeah. We just had a question dropped into the Q and A about shadowbanning, so that’s helpful, because I thought-
Kate:
It always comes up. It’s like I just know.
Ashley:
Yep. Are there any tools, or even other links, other websites, that you would recommend to really utilize Pinterest in terms of pinning, scheduling, someone dropped in Tailwind in the chat earlier. What’s your toolset when it comes to Pinterest, or is there one?
Kate:
Yeah, I would say our toolset number one is Canva. We love it. You can buy Pinterest templates all over. I find that a lot of people get fatigued with creating Pinterest images, so just buy some templates, call it good, put it in and remove that obstacle. Number two would be going to Tailwind. It is still the one that we use, however, we have leaned into PLANOLY as well. We’ve tested Leader, we’ve tested Canva, and we’ve tested… There was another one that we also looked at. Those two right now, Tailwind and PLANOLY have the most functionality, and we do see PLANOLY leaning into some new features coming up that will be helpful in other areas of scheduling.
Kate:
I’ll just wait for that to drop next week, but just be watching what they have coming up, because they’re continuing to be pretty forward thinking with how they serve pinners. But the one main difference is that Tailwind has a really great interval tool, which allows you to take one pin and drip it out over multiple boards, over the course of time. PLANOLY does not have that functionality, so it’s more, a little bit manual, of pinning along the way, which can add time to that part of your Pinterest, I guess, administrative details.
Ashley:
It seems like there’s definitely a lot of changes happening in Pinterest. I’d say probably more so than the Facebook and Instagrams out there, that are making changes and not saying anything to anyone about it. Are there any resources or publications? How do you stay on top of all of the new resources out there, or just the Pinterest changes in general?
Kate:
Yes. I’m going to make a slight plug for a Pinterest Made Simple newsletter, because it all gets funneled weekly into that. But what we do is we do run education reports, so I do have the advantage of having somebody on my team who we do Google alerts, we follow publications like we follow the Pinterest stock trends. We do the Pinterest earnings reports. Those give lots of keys as to where they’re going. We also follow the Pinterest business community. That is a big one right there, because you can get some nuggets along the way. Within the Pinterest business community, there is a Pinterest business newsletter. Now, these used to really just… They sucked, and now they’re getting a lot better and there’s a lot more information that is getting pulled into that.
Kate:
But what we like is pulling from things like Tech Crunch or Social Media Today or all of these, so we get alerts as to what’s changing and coming up and what Pinterest is really putting their resources into, because they just launched a new app, just recently, they’ve hired a new CEO, who, former Venmo, Google commerce, so new chief shopping officer. There’s a lot of things. That’s how we stay on top of it. I say we, it’s not just me, but we do monthly education reports monthly. Every Monday, sorry, we do education reports.
Ashley:
Wow, that’s that’s interesting on where all of that’s going to go. Very intriguing.
Kate:
Yeah, super fascinating.
Ashley:
Looking at things from a day-to-day perspective, say you have your blog, you’re producing new content on your blog on a regular basis. You are trying to do all the social media things that you need to be doing. What does that look like for Pinterest specifically? How much are you pinning, versus engaging with other pins or profiles, or what’s your ratio look like in terms of actually networking on the platform, versus posting your own?
Kate:
Yeah. I would say, for Pinterest, it’s always about posting our own stuff. We rarely, if ever, share anybody else’s. If you want to be kind and nice, because you think someone’s awesome, great go for it. But it’s your content first. I want you to be thinking about that when it comes to Pinterest. There’s no trick to, if I pin 80% of my own or 20% of others, that’s the magic ratio, throw that all out. It doesn’t matter. Just go 100% all in on your own stuff, unless you want to pin other people’s stuff because you think it’s awesome, which is great. Then I would say number two is you want to be thinking about… I’ll share my example of my workflow, and hopefully this will inspire people. When I look at my whole suite of marketing tools out there that I want to use to bring people to Simple Pin Media, Google is first, Pinterest is second, YouTube is third.
Kate:
I am very content-forward. I have a podcast every week, I want to max that out, I want to drive as much Google traffic to my site as possible, but I also want to leverage that with Pinterest. Every single thing I build is maxed out for those two things. And then I publish on the platform, not thinking what it’s going to get right away, but what it’s going to get residually. If I have a new post, I’m going to pin it, through Tailwind right now, once, every two weeks, to every board that it’s relevant. We create a new post each week, so now it’s being dripped out over time. Don’t get caught in that two-week mark. It’s not a magic number. It’s just, we pulled it out of a hat and said, “Two weeks sounds like a good idea.” If you pin eight days, I think you’re awesome. Just don’t do it every 24 hours, back to back to back to back to back, because that’s a bad user experience.
Kate:
If somebody comes onto your profile and they see the same thing over and over again, they’re going to be like, “Spammer.” Just set something. Also, there’s not a magic number of pins per day. Now, we are testing, here at Simple Pin. We’re getting a little bit risky and just throwing all the traditional rules out, and in July we said, “We’re going to pin 20 pins a day. We don’t even care. We’re just going to throw it all out there and see if that number is magic.” It increased our traffic 4%. I don’t know if it was the number of pins per day or not, so we’re going to double check it later. Now we’re actually in a testing strategy of just doing idea pins. We’re not even doing regular pins. Why I say this is that your data is going to guide you to what’s working and not working. We’ve had seasons where we have pinned five pins a day, and then all of a sudden we’re like, “Let’s go one.” We went one, it was horrible.
Kate:
We were like, “Okay, let’s boost that back up.” When it comes to timeframe between pins and then how many pins per day, your data and your engagement is going to tell you what’s working and not working. And then we just continue to rinse and repeat that system. We’re content first, play to Google and Pinterest, get it out onto Pinterest, drip it out, then reflect back on the data with what worked and didn’t work. And for us, what we’ve discovered, Pinterest users love our how to. We can put out how to upload a video on Pinterest, how to clean up your Pinterest boards. Every single time it hits all day long. We do a interview with somebody who’s talking about a million dollar business. It doesn’t work. That might not be the same for your business. If you find that everybody loves your banana cream pie, you just got to do it every single day. Not every single day, but what I’m saying is that it’s that rinse and repeat, and let your data be the guide in how many pins you do per day, not a post in the Facebook.
Andrew Wilder:
Kate, you just used the term, idea pin versus regular pin. What are those two things?
Kate:
Yes. Okay, in 2020, Pinterest saw the beginning forward movement of TikTok. They were like, “Hey, wait a minute, these TikTok users are going crazy and they’re staying on the platform a lot longer. We have this platform where everybody knows you have to leave it. Well, that puts us in a crunch, because advertisers are not going to spend money, because our time on platform isn’t that long.” They created story pins, which were later rebranded into idea pins. The whole goal of them was to create this TikTokesque thing that was on Pinterest to keep users on longer. They could go back to advertisers and say, “Hey, see? We’re just like TikTok. We’re just as awesome. People are sticking around as long.” However, it’s different in the sense that it’s like a hybrid of an Instagram story and a TikTok all in one, and it’s really Pinner-forward.
Kate:
It’s about how to do something, not you dancing side-by-side with somebody in a challenge or whatever. Pinterest had to thread that needle to figure out, how do we educate people on what idea pins are and content creators? And it’s a really, really great way to take your one piece of content, that maybe is five ways to use tequila, and you could go, “Here’s my five cards in my idea pin.” And now not only do you have your pillar content, but you have this other new piece of content. They don’t link, however, Pinterest is testing a link feature where it will link out your website. But what we have found amongst our clients is that those who get that are primarily new Pinterest profiles. There’s been a few exceptions where they’re older ones, but we’ve seen it’s mostly just the ones who are with in the last year or so. That’s what idea pins is, a hybrid of TikTok and Instagram.
Casey Markee:
Just to interact here real quick, because we get a lot of questions on ideal pins, and I read the… Just for everyone on the call, I have been shorting Pinterest for a year-and-a-half. The reason I’ve been shorting Pinterest for a while is because it’s overvalued, but also because of all the information they reveal in their quarterly filings. One of the questions that they had was a whole section on ideal pins and how they couldn’t get these to monetize very well. My question is to Kate, is that, is this something that the average food blogger, for example, one of the examples they use in the quarterly statement was how to cook a meal as a fantastic way to leverage ideal pins, and they were having a hard time getting people to adopt that and use ideal pins in that regard. Is that something you think that food bloggers should really invest in? Is this something that Pinterest is going to double down on and continue to push out, with regards to these ideal pins?
Kate:
Yeah. And just slight correction, it’s idea instead of ideal, so I just wanted to-
Casey Markee:
Idea, yeah. That’s my Kansas pronunciation.
Kate:
Okay, there you go.
Casey Markee:
Idea.
Kate:
I would say there’s three ways. One, yes, it’s a good thing to test, to expand out to your content to potentially reach somebody new in a, you don’t have to wait six weeks before your holiday. You can do that week of. Yes, number one, number two, they have a brand partnership piece that is happening right now, that I think if you are a food blogger specifically who works with brands, this could open the door for you to be able to monetize an idea pin in your media package that you sell to brands right there. Plus, Pinterest can broker the whole thing with that, so there’s that. Number three, there’s a creator rewards program, wild bumpy and still getting out of the gate, that is another way to monetize your idea pins that you could potentially make money off of them, and number four is idea pin ads.
Kate:
Now, we don’t know how these are rolling out just yet. We had a podcast last week, week before, and that went into the details behind idea pin ads and how you can use them. I see them as a diversification opportunity. If you are somebody who’s only doing standard pins, I would tell you you’re missing the opportunity to get in front of people with what Pinterest is putting in front of people. Now, whether or not they can monetize it on the stock side and all those kinds of things, I still think they’re going to keep it and they’re still going to lean into it. And I hope that they link later, just not quite sure yet.
Ashley:
Perfect. Well that wraps up the Pinterest portion. Thank you so much, Kate, but don’t worry everyone, if you still have Pinterest questions, we are going to come back. We’re just going to do a quick segue, because Google had to release an update that is not as helpful as the title claims it to be. With that, Casey, do you want to… Oh wait, I think I almost forgot something. There was something Arsen wanted me to tell you guys, that’s very important and groundbreaking news, apparently, if you go and follow tophatrank on Instagram, @tophatrank, he’s going to do a giveaway and give out this epic T-shirt next week.
Casey Markee:
Hey, that’s a pretty good deal. That’s right.
Ashley:
Small plug before we segue. You’re welcome, Arsen.
Arsen Rabinovich:
Thank you.
Ashley:
Good one for participating.
Arsen Rabinovich:
No big deal.
Ashley:
Oh, no big deal?
Arsen Rabinovich:
No big deal.
Ashley:
Like what you did there. Casey, okay, this update; news is everywhere. What’s going on with the Helpful Content Update? What is it? Are we freaking out still?
Casey Markee:
No, honestly not. The helpful update has been out for exactly one week as of tomorrow. It went live on Thursday, 8-25, and so far we have not seen much at all with regards to sites being impacted. Now, this is pretty interesting, and I found this out myself just very recently. The max sites you can have in a Google Search Console is 500. I found that out the hard way as I was trying to onboard some clients. I had to delete some profiles, so I took the opportunity to go ahead and connect this to a stream to pull out a lot of data, so that I could track things over the last six days. I have 487 sites in Search Console as of today. 411 of them are food and lifestyle blogs. Of those 487 sites, 16 have had a train in traffic, a change in traffic, it’s the bourbon talking, change in traffic of 5% or more over the last seven days.
Casey Markee:
That’s a grand total of 3%. Of those 16 sites, only five were food blogs. And of those five that were food blogs, one was hacked, we corrected that, two admitted they unpublished a ton of content they shouldn’t have and so they went ahead and reversed that, one had a web story that was responsible for a significant amount of traffic that lost traffic, it had nothing to do with the update, and the last one had an analytics issue, which means that she accidentally removed code, which caused a dip in traffic that she then corrected. Again, 487 blogs, 411 of them are food blogs, not one of them can I see any evidence, after six days, were impacted negatively by the Helpful Content Update. 411 blogs. Now, that doesn’t mean that things can’t change. This update is supposed to be two-plus weeks. Danny Sullivan was asked about this on Twitter today. I’m happy to paste over the link. This is an exchange that I’m going to give to Ashley and she’s going to post.
Casey Markee:
He was talking with a colleague of ours, Glen Gabe, this morning, about how the fact that there wasn’t much to this update and Danny rightfully replied that, “Hey, the update’s not over and we’re taking all this data to make changes.” And that’s great. That’s a good point on Google’s part, is that things happen slowly for a reason, so that we can prevent from throwing a net in that’s going to pull in sites that shouldn’t be ‘penalized’, so to speak. But this Helpful Content Update specifically is there to make sure that the algorithms reward useful content. They used very specific examples that had nothing to do with the food, lifestyle, and recipe niches. The examples they used were things like, “We want to penalize sites that advertise they know things that they shouldn’t.”
Casey Markee:
How many of you have been on your Google feed, have pulled up a thing that says, “Hey, if you want to know what’s going to happen on the Animal Kingdom finale, click here.” And you click here and realize that there’s no information on the page. It’s just them writing this long article and they’re going to update the article after the Animal Kingdom finale, so to speak. Which I bring that up, because we watched the Animal Kingdom and it was a fantastic finale. Very disappointing. Those are the kind of examples that I want you to understand that this helpful update is targeting. They’re targeting, in many cases, things that are not food and lifestyle-related. I know a lot of this is AI-generated as well. Their whole goal with this, if you look back at the trend, when they started to say in May, “Hey, AI content is against our guidelines.”
Casey Markee:
And then in June, “Hey, we’ve updated our guidelines to say that AI-generated content is against our guidelines.” And then boom, boom, Helpful Content announced soon after, saying, “By the way, we might be going down here and making some algorithmic adjustments,” you could make a little bit of a determination that A, B, and C might be related. It’s very possible that these relevant changes that are going through with the Helpful Content Update are going to end as a lamb and go out as a lamb as well, for the average food and lifestyle blogger. As I mentioned on Facebook, if you have unfortunately gone through and made very dramatic changes to your site, maybe I’ve no-indexed a significant amount of content that I shouldn’t, or maybe didn’t need to no-index, or maybe you actually went in and unpublished a large amount of content that you shouldn’t have touched, that all that did was create a significant amount of 404s.
Casey Markee:
All that did was create issues with your existing users and all that did was destroy or remove possible back links to your site that were helping you in a tangential way. As Danny and everyone else said when this update launched previously, when Google launched the helpful update, they had already baked in a testing data set that they were using on the initial update. Everyone who scrambled over the last week, or even the three or four days before the update, trying to say, “Oh my God, I’m going to insulate myself,” you didn’t do that. You didn’t dodge any bullets. All you did was create more issues for yourself. It’s not something that we could really prepare for. This is an after effect issue. We really won’t know what’s going to happen with this update for another three to four weeks at a minimum, but at least right now, the evidence that we have in front of us, especially the large number of sites I have access to, shows a very muted response.
Ashley:
That’s a good point, the three to four weeks that, like all updates, they take time. Arsen, what are the telltale signs that you’ve been impacted by the update? Or are there any? Do we even know what they look like yet?
Arsen Rabinovich:
Right. Google gives us just the basics on this. Typically, you see a decline in traffic. That’s how you know you were affected. We look at other things that we look at when we’re monitoring our clients Search Console and analytics. We’re looking at shifts in impressions, shifts in positions, where those positions are. Are they fluctuations on page two? Fluctuations on page one? There’s all kinds of signs. For this particular update it’s a little weird, because if you are going to be affected, and you probably won’t, but if you are going to be affected by it, it’s going to be difficult to diagnose, because it’s going to affect the entire site. It’s not like we’re going to be able to pinpoint which post on your site was the cause of this or which section of your site was the cause of this. It’s going to affect the entire site.
Arsen Rabinovich:
With that, even with that, and we don’t think Google’s going to come in and mess up a bunch of websites, just because. I have a feeling, and Casey can chime in on this, I have a feeling they’re coming in very carefully with this to not create a huge mess. But I definitely think they’re going to expand on this, because the initial seed set of data that they collected, and keep in mind, this is all machine learning, it needs to learn from somewhere. You’ve heard me say this over and over, it needs to learn from somewhere. They’re going to start with this initial seed set of data, and as it continues to refine, it’s going to get more knowledgeable, it’s going to get better understanding which content is there for the sole purpose of tricking search engines.
Arsen Rabinovich:
I don’t think any of you are going to be impacted by this. Even the content, and we just had a call earlier with a few bloggers, even content that’s your older content that you have that was, “Things I ate today.” And then you have one for every day and the only thing they changes is Tuesday, Wednesday, it’s the same. I don’t even think Google’s going to care about that. I don’t think, at least not anytime soon. Be very careful to not go in, and I’ve had calls this week and last week, with bloggers who are like, “Oh, I removed a bunch of content.”
Arsen Rabinovich:
“Why? Did you have knowledge? Was there data that told you that this is the content they need to remove?” And the content they removed was useless content so it didn’t cause harm, but definitely don’t go in and preventatively start making changes to your site. Even when if you do feel like you’re being affected by an update, I would never tell you to go in and make changes. You want to wait for the update to finish rolling out. You want to collect enough data and you want to understand, because otherwise you’re just layering more stuff on top of other stuff, more variables that will go into trying to figure out, if you get in contact with me or Casey to try to help you figure out what happened, all the little changes you’ve made during that update, that thinking that you’re going to help yourself recover, are just extra variables for us to dig through.
Ashley:
Thank you, Arsen. Andrew, have you noticed anything on your side with the update?
Andrew Wilder:
No, I honestly didn’t expect to. I read the guidelines in the announcement post, and I want to drop that link in, because everyone has a tendency to see the link from the Google post and then just stay on Facebook. But I think it’s really important, if you’re worried about this, to read what Google actually says, go to the source. They say, “Focus on people-first content.” I think sharing recipes is the very definition of helpful. Right away, I don’t think, off of that, that they’re targeting food blogs in particular, or anything that you are actually writing to help your users. It really comes down to the thing we’re always saying, and this is my mantra, “Write for your user, not for Google.” And if you’ve been doing that all along, that’s all Google is saying to do here, really. They’re just saying, “Now we’re going to have an AI help us determine this and we’re going to ding your whole site if you haven’t been doing it.”
Andrew Wilder:
A couple weeks ago, we needed to shop for a new dishwasher, and so I was Googling, “Best dishwashers, 2022.” And all the blog posts had the same Bosch dishwasher. The Bosch 300 was at the top of every single blog post list, because consumer reports rate it high and it ranks well on Amazon. All these blog posts though, then they were like, “But the next best one is the KitchenAid.” And they’re just using this information based on reviews on Amazon. They haven’t tested the dishwashers, and so I was like in this echo chamber of reviews, so of course all the same stuff gets echoed. I went to Home Depot and I actually liked the KitchenAid more, so that’s what we got. They’re targeting stuff like that, where it’s like, “Hey, I’m going to make a blog post of the 10 best dishwashers so I can get some affiliate links and get some traffic,” when you’re not really an expert in dishwashers.
Andrew Wilder:
If you’ve actually tested all 10 dishwashers and you take original photos of those dishwashers and you show them and you’re using them and you show the gunk that didn’t come off the plate or whatever it is, that’s what Google wants you to be doing. They want you to be creating real content for real people. I think you’ve all been doing this all along, so it’s a whole lot of nothing for us, frankly. That’s my take on this. I think it’s going to be nothing, but it depends. If you haven’t been writing for users and you’ve been writing for Google, then you might get hosed.
Casey Markee:
It depends, really? Is that your final answer?
Ashley:
That’s what he’s going to end on. And we’ve got about nine minutes. We’re going to head into Q and A. There’s going to be a lot more Google update questions, and as we get info, we will share them. Definitely plan on whatever we’re talking about in September, if we see anything else on about the update, we will definitely make sure, and just like we did today, set some time aside and update you guys. But we have 19 unanswered questions about Pinterest, and so I’d love to dive into them with Kate while she’s still here. Okay, question from Tracy: How do you get viewers to go to your site from idea pins? I’ve seen that you have to include the URL to your website in the description, but this doesn’t necessarily help to bring clicks to my website.
Kate:
I would say that right now, your chances of getting clicks off of idea pins are very low. And so what you should be focusing on is getting people to save that and click through to your profile and then they will click on your website link from your profile. Now, idea pins do have analytics that show you how many follows you got out of it and how many profile visits you got, and so if people want more information, they will be drawn to your profile. That’s really the primary workflow for the Pinner right now. I think it’s one of those things that everybody really wants a link and they really want it to click like a standard pin and you just have to let go of that and see if there’s any creative ways to call them to action at the end of your idea pin, to get them really interested.
Kate:
I have done that. I’ve been so excited about something that I’ve seen an idea pin, that I’ve gone to the website and I’ve really searched. I’m not an SEO person, but I’m going to say, if you don’t have a search button or a search thing, it’s really apparent on your website, it’s a really bad user experience, because I really want to find I’m looking for. And if you get a lot of traffic from Pinterest, that should be pretty front and center. That’s really how it’s going to happen.
Ashley:
Next question from Zenzi: Are group boards still useful, where a group of bloggers pin to it from the same board?
Kate:
No, mm-mm. No, no, hard stop it right there. Firm answer.
Ashley:
Perfect. Perfect.
Andrew Wilder:
We’re going to get Kate a T-shirt that just says, “No.”
Ashley:
Yes. I like that. I like that a lot.
Kate:
I’m not, it depends, I’m a no on this one.
Ashley:
Question from Chrissy: New accounts versus old accounts, any difference in strategy? My older blog accounts have solid Pinterest traffic, because of the history of old pins. But my newer blog accounts seem very hard to budge. I’m wondering if the time investment is worth it for the new blogs, where the focus is traffic and ads and not sponsored content, services, et cetera?
Kate:
Yeah. I think it’s like feeding a fire. You just never know when those ones you’re doing now will turn into the old ones, which will bring you the traffic later. It’s really easy to look at. I pinned today and it’s 30 days later and it’s not doing anything, but I have many, many stories of people six months down the line, all of a sudden this thing gets picked up and you all of a sudden get a lot of traffic. It’s a snowball or it’s a fire, whatever metaphor you want to use, but just keep plugging into it and then it will keep bringing returns later.
Ashley:
This question from Tammy, I think you touched on it slightly, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about it, when you were sharing your strategy. Tammy asked: Is it okay to pin the same pin to different relevant boards, or do you have to have a new pin on each relevant board?
Kate:
Yeah, same pin to other relevant boards, absolutely. We still do that as well, because you’re thinking of each board as a keyword bucket, and Pinterest looks at the board name, the board description and the pin description within that, and if they find that to be the most relevant to a searcher on Pinterest, they’re going to pull from that. And so you just never know what board it’s going to be, so you want to pin to all relevant boards. Same pin. There’s not a trick, like you got to do different ones to try to trick the system. Don’t worry about that.
Ashley:
Feels like everything these days, we have to find a loophole to trick it.
Casey Markee:
For a banana cream pie, does that mean it’s the cream board and the regular pies board, and then seasonal board as well?
Kate:
And then the dairy free and then the vegan.
Casey Markee:
Is it a dairy free? Okay.
Kate:
Yes. You go crazy, Casey. Everyone.
Casey Markee:
Got it. Okay, noted.
Ashley:
We have time for just a couple more questions. I see some questions are in the chat box as well. Please make sure and copy and paste those into the Q and A, just so we make sure they 100% get answered. Question from Marjorie, what are best practices for how many boards you should have?
Kate:
How many boards you need to showcase your content. If you talk about gluten free breakfast, you can only make that stretch so far. You don’t want to have everything gluten free and then I’m going to talk about my nails, I’m going to talk about my hair. It’s not relevant. There’s no magic number to boards. It’s just, what do you need to accurately distribute your content over all these boards, without it too far reaching or not being relevant to your brand?
Ashley:
While we’re on the question of boards, Carrie has a question about how we can optimize our Pinterest boards.
Kate:
Yeah. Your name should be no more than four words. It needs to be very specific, very targeted, so take the example of gluten free. You don’t want just a gluten-free recipe board, but you want gluten-free breakfast, gluten-free snacks for kids, gluten-free lunches. Then you have a board description. You want to put that name, plus the natural sounding sentence in there, and that’s how you really optimize it. If you have board names with hashtags or you have board names that are like, “This is so fun,” that’s not what Pinterest is looking for. They’re looking for clear, streamlined buckets of pins that they can showcase to the people who are searching for it.
Ashley:
That makes sense. And so echoing the hashtag issue, even in boards, is not relevant. Last question, so make sure if you have not put your question into the Q and A, you have two minutes to do so, and we will make sure it gets answered. But last question from Nicole, should you be using Rich Pins?
Kate:
Okay, I’m sure in SEO, you guys all have this thing that you’re like, “I feel like I’ve answered this question 7 million times.” This is one of those things that really stems from back 2018, there was this huge glitch with Rich Pins. Rich Pins, I don’t hear the conversation as much anymore, but when you get a business account and you begin to pin pins, it automatically adds the metadata, the Rich Pin data that they need to know that that pin is yours. This pin goes to this website, has this title, this description, this piece, so yes, use it. It stemmed from… Can I go into a little bit of history here, so people know the why? Okay. It stemmed from this thing, I think it was 2018, called Recipegate, where Pinterest was really, basically trying to circumvent Pinners. They were basically hijacking content and it was connected to the Rich Pin.
Kate:
And so there was this big wave that said, “Turn them off, turn them off, turn them off, turn them off.” And then Pinterest was like, “Okay, we pumped the brakes. Our bad. Go ahead and use them again. We’re not going to steal your content.” Okay. That’s what it was from. Then there’s still this debate of turning off, turning on, will it affect traffic, will it not? Just leave them on, because that’s how you make sure it’s your content. Everything travels with it, all the data you need to tell the algorithm what it is your pin is about and show it to more people. There’s no trick anymore between turning it off and turning it on. You just take that word Rich Pin, yes or no, and just go, done. That’s my soapbox. We’ll end there.
Ashley:
That’s perfect. I absolutely love it. Thank you everybody for tuning in today. We are going to wrap it up with that. We’ll be publishing the recap blog post with this video replay, as well as the transcript, Q and A, and all the resources next week, and we’ll also be sending out a followup email about what September’s topic is going to be and how to sign up. Kate, thank you so much for joining us. This is-
Casey Markee:
Thank you, Kate.
Kate:
Thank you for having me.
Casey Markee:
Very nice speaking with you.
Arsen Rabinovich:
Thank you.
Kate:
Thank you.
Ashley:
Perfect. Well, take care everybody, and until next time.
Casey Markee:
Be cool out there, everyone. Take care.
Arsen Rabinovich:
Bye.
