Close to 4 months ago, I wrote an article on the Best Paint Colors to Sell Your House. I put a lot of time and effort in creating the article and the graphics to go with it, and it's a very thorough post.
After I wrote it, I thought, what the heck am I doing. I'm never going to rank for a painting article and especially not on this topic that everyone and their brother has written about. When I did a search, I could see that not only were there tons of articles on this topic (no surprise), but also many written on very high authority sites. So, I kind of gave up any hope with getting traffic from google.
I figured that maybe it would work on Pinterest. And, indeed it did!
Very quickly, my pin (you can see it here) gained traction and get tons of repins and lots of traffic. In fact, it's now been repinned over 111,000 times. For the last 2 months or so, it's been delivering around 17,000-18,000 clicks/month to my site and has become my #1 article...basically doubling my #1 flooring article.
I was thrilled with that.
When I looked at the traffic in January, it looked like 99% of the traffic came from Pinterest. I think I had around 20 clicks from organic search.
Fast forward to Monday of this week. I was talking to a local customer who wanted to schedule a color consultation. Based on what she was saying, I could tell she read this article. In fact, I had 3 people this week that requested this, and 2 the week before and one the week prior. I thought that was interesting since these people were local and all happening so quickly (and it's February!).
So I googled the topic and lo and behold, I found my article on Page 1 of google. It's much lower on the page - appears to be around the 6th position. And, it looks like around 10% of the traffic is coming from organic search. Wow!
So how is this happening? Basically, I write a very high quality article (i.e. and epic post...generally 2,000-3000 words) and make it super helpful for the reader. I try to optimize it for search. Then, I create an amazing pin for pinterest (or at least I try to). Then, I share it a bunch on Pinterest. Then, others repin it and click on it...and read the article. Their time on page is long because it's a great article (at least in my opinion...but average time on page is over 5 mins, so that's a good sign).
This in turn sends good signals to google, so it starts to gain some traction on google. From there, people read the article and stay on page for a while, and some even leave comments and questions, and this in turn sends more good signals to google, and voila, I'm on Page 1. (looking back through my data, it looks like it happened 3 months after I published it...but I was just too busy to notice it).
By the way, this is not the 1st time this has happened. I've done this several times with new articles, and I'm finding that Pinterest is helping me get more traffic to my site and ACCELERATING my google rankings. It's truly a double win. I'm going to try to replicate this some more.
My new goal is to get that article ranked #5...or maybe even #4 (I have a hunch that I can't get much higher, but we'll see).
Yesterday, Kevin Vitali had a featured article called "Are your Blog Posts PINTERESTING?" He is right on. Pinterest is huge, and there are so many here are missing a huge opportunity.
I've been getting around 35,000+ pageviews a month from Pinterest. It is by far, my highest performing social media channel and continues to grow. Of course, this number understates the true impact as it's also growing and accelerating my search results.
If you'd like to learn more about how to do well on Pinterest, check out my article on 11 Hacks to drive insane growth from Pinterest.
And, if you want to help me with this article, feel free to do any of the following:
- Link to my article (this topic is probably related to any article you write about tips for selling your home)
- Repin my pin (and this will help you...because if your read my pinterest article, you'll see that repinning high performing pins helps your pinterest account).
- Leave a comment on my article. These can also help the article rank better.
I hope this info is helpful. Pinterest is fun and easy...and it's a big opportunity. Importantly, unlike the other social media, it does not require a lot of followers to do well. And, unlike the other "social media" is is not "social."...so 1. It doesn't take much time, 2. You pins can live on for years. Why? Because pinterest is basically a visual search engine.
So, if you haven't taken the plunge yet, I'd encourage you do so.
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