Before you spend another cent or another Sunday on Pinterest, spend thirty minutes finding out what is actually wrong. Most accounts I audit have the same handful of problems, and you can find yours with nothing more than your analytics tab and a bit of honesty.
Grab a coffee and open your Pinterest business account. We are going to walk through it the same way I do when someone hands me theirs.
Minute 0 to 5: your profile
Read your display name. Does it contain a keyword someone would search, or just your brand name? A brand name alone tells Pinterest nothing. “Your Brand, Pinterest Marketing for Content-Rich Brands” tells it exactly who should see you.
Then read your bio the same way. You have 160 characters, and every one of them is searchable. If your bio could describe any business on earth, rewrite it.
Minute 5 to 12: your boards
Count your boards, then answer honestly: would a stranger understand what each one contains from its name alone? Cute board names feel personal, but Pinterest reads them literally. “Sunday Slow Mornings” gets found by nobody. “Cozy Breakfast Recipes” gets found constantly.
Also look for the junk drawer. Almost every account has one board where everything unrelated ended up. Archive it, because it confuses Pinterest about what your account is for.
Minute 12 to 20: your pins
Open your ten most recent pins and check three things on each: a keyword in the title, a real sentence in the description, and something in the alt text field. In my experience the alt text is empty on nine pins out of ten, and it matters far more than people think. I wrote about why in why your pins get no clicks.
Then hold your phone at arm’s length and look at your feed. Can you read your own pins? Be brutal here. Your buyer will be.
Minute 20 to 27: your analytics
Open your analytics and ignore impressions for a moment. Find outbound clicks. That number is the whole reason your account exists, because it counts the people who actually left Pinterest to visit you.
Now look at which pins earned those clicks. The pattern hiding in there (a topic, a format, a style) is your account telling you what to make more of. Most people never look.
Minute 27 to 30: your links
Click your top five pins and follow them all the way through. Do the links work? Does the page load fast on your phone? Does it deliver what the pin promised? A broken link quietly wastes everything upstream of it, and Pinterest notices when people bounce.
What to do with your list
You now have a list of problems, probably longer than you expected. Worry not! Almost everything on it is fixable without starting over, and the fixes compound. Keyword work you do this month keeps working next year, which is the entire reason I love this platform.
Start with whatever costs you clicks today: broken links first, then pin titles and alt text, then boards. Our Pinterest SEO guide covers the keyword side step by step.
And if you would rather sit down with me and go through all of it together in one session, that is what the Kickstart Package is for. Honestly though, run the thirty minutes above first. You may find the free version was all you needed.