This is called “The Pinterest Bump”: From nowhere, unfound, non-existent in the Google SERP’s to page 1, with just a couple of pins. Couldn’t be easier. I’ll take it, every time. Pinterest is a valuable tool for SEO, when done correctly. Here’s another keyphrase that went from position 18 to position 11: I originally discovered The Pinterest Bump in 2012 and made a video about it. Here’s what was discovered back then: In mid-march, I wrote a blog post and pinned the image associated with it – a pair of shoe’s I’d seen in the Nordstrom catalog. The shoes went somewhat viral on Pinterest and accumulated a couple hundred pins. That was awesome and brought in some extra traffic. But Google caught wind of this, and actually ranked my image in position #1 in Google Image search for the designer’s name. Now every time his shoes appear in the Nordstrom catalog they send in the mail, I get a big spike in traffic! All in all this keyword has brought me over 4000 new visitors from Google. I installed a frame breaker plugin to bring visitors from Google Image search directly to my site to further maximize the page. It’s received over 2000 pins since I originally posted it and is still getting traffic spikes today, like this one. …And this made me think… I wonder if Pinterest can do this regularly, and did it just work with Google image search? To find out, I ran a test. I sent about 600 pins (again, from a Fiverr gig) to another post. The post had no ranking for it’s main key phrase. In fact, it still doesn’t. Boo-hoo, right? No! Because what it did end up ranking for was a surprise to me. The page now ranks in Google at position 6 (not Google Image search, but regular Google) for the words used in the caption of the Pinterest image. It turns out, Google looks at the way people describe the image on Pinterest much like anchor text. However it is captioned and described it what Google sees as what it should rank for. The Fiver gig allowed for a few images to be pinned, and the second image I pinned took about a week longer to show up, but when it did, it ranked in position 8 and also ranked for the words used in the Pinterest description, not the key phrase the page had been targeting. SEOMoz conducted an experiment in 2011 on Google’s treatment of Twitter links being similar. On a site like Twitter, there’s no anchor text. There’s just the tweet and then a link. SEOMoz found that the text within the tweet served as anchor text, and that a link could rank for a key phrase that was in the tweet without any other link building or proper anchor text. Pinterest is similar in that there is no anchor text – only an image, and that image has a description below it. Today, the Pinterest Bump is alive and well – in fact, it’s thriving. What do you need to take advantage of The Pinterest Bump – that is, how do you use Pinterest for SEO? How To Use Pinterest For SEO You’ll need: 1. A well maintained Pinterest account. If you don’t have one already, here’s how we do it. If that’s not in your wheelhouse, our team can do it for you. 2. An attractive pin that’s likely to go viral or at the least, to encourage repins; no stock photos. If you don’t have a graphics person on hand, again, our team is available to you. Then you get to pinning: Here’s an example of a pin done wrong: The keyphrase that this pin is targeting is, “Working long hours is often a symptom of bigger problems within your business…” And that’s not a keyphrase that people are actually searching for in Google. So the pin isn’t giving the post it links to any useful SEO benefit. Sure, there are links pointing to is and legitimate backlinks are always good. But those backlinks aren’t helping the post rank for any specific keyphrase. This pin, however, is targeting a specific keyphrase: While the image leaves something to be desired for optimizing Pinterest traffic, the SEO benefit is strong with this pin. The caption